Mayism is reheated Blairism and I’m afraid it will be just as disastrous

History tells us the PM’s promise to marry business freedom and state regulation is doomed

is governed by socially conscientious rules, and government intervention, too, but only within acceptable “limits”.

Now, where have we heard all this before? Way back before the present historical era began: before Brexit became the one and only consuming issue of our public discourse, before the bank crisis of 2008, and before the politics of the West was fractured by the populism of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, there was an all-conquering, electorally miraculous philosophy called the Third Way (sometimes known as the Infallible Doctrine of the Centre Ground). Invented by Bill Clinton’s team of professional strategists and adopted – with spectacular success

– by Tony Blair, it was, in its day, believed to mark the end of political debate as we had known it.

It may be difficult to believe, boys and girls, but back in the Before Time, it was widely accepted that two mutually contradictory propositions that could be uttered in the same sentence could be made to coexist in real life. You could support free-market economics while restraining the “selfish” profit motives that drove its creativity. (“Supporting business, but holding it to account”.) Government could intervene in the economy in order to bring “fairness” without ever distorting the motivations of the people who had to make real life-changing decisions. (“We believe in what government can do, but know its limits.”)

Most important, you would choose to see business as valuable primarily because it could provide the tax revenue to fund public services – which were the real social good. This is what Gordon Brown used to call using “the proceeds of growth” to improve the welfare of the people. The entrepreneurial creativity and individual ambition that drove people to start and grow their business ventures were not seen as valuable components of the human condition in their own right. They were simply a rather squalid means to an end.

In other words, politicians of the liberal Left had accepted that private wealth creation was necessary because it was the only source of real money that government could then dispense as it chose. This was most eloquently expressed by Peter Mandelson, who famously observed that New Labour had no objection to “people becoming filthy rich”: it was those filthy rich who would supply most of the funds that a Labour chancellor, in his infinite benevolence, could distribute to those he felt were deserving.

This sounds splendid, doesn’t it? Keep the private sector thriving but securely tethered to the wider national interest. Make use of the economic growth that only it can fuel, to create a fairer society.

But wait a minute. How, precisely, do you decide what limitations on business and its profit-making are desirable? Is it a good or a bad thing, for example, for competing companies to fight to the death? That ruthless competition might well produce better deals for the consumer and push incompetent players out of the game – good result. Then again, it might result in the absolute triumph of one player and so create a private monopoly – bad result. But who can accurately predict the outcome? Not government bureaucrats, who are unlikely to have real business experience and whose decision-making will be clunky, out-ofdate and often dim-witted.

Then there is the matter of what

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion precisely constitutes the social good to which the business sector is conscripted. Is it an “equal” society in which everybody gets support, whatever their contributions or efforts? Or is it simply, as Mrs May seemed to imply, that the tax revenues raised from a successful (but “held to account”) business sector can be used to finance improvements to public services such as the NHS and transport infrastructure?

Surely that latter proposal is not as contentious as the first one. Or is it? Gordon Brown had exactly this idea. He doubled the amount of funding that went into the NHS – and got negligible improvements. That is because publicly owned and run services are notoriously wasteful and inefficient. Pouring more and more tax revenue into services that are answerable to bureaucrats, rather than consumers, does not produce good results.

Even Mr Brown came to recognise this, which is why Labour placed so much faith in public-private partnerships. This had to be the perfect Third Way solution, the ideal marriage of business and social interests. Except that it wasn’t. Government bureaucrats, it turned out, were just as hopeless at making sure they got value for money when dealing with the private sector as they were when managing their wholly owned assets.

The trouble with businesses, and the people who run them, is that they can be merciless and self-serving in pursuit of profit. The trouble with public services, and the unions that run them, is that they can disregard the needs of consumers in pursuit of political power.

There is no easy way for government to reconcile this – as we are apparently going to have to learn all over again.

Government bureaucrats were just as hopeless at making sure they got value for money when dealing with the private sector as when managing their wholly owned assets