CITY AND SUBURBAN
The great Hezza bandwagon gallops along with happy hints of hog heaven
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
ways ready to bet on a bandwagon, my City friends had their glasses out the other day when Michael Heseltine came to Guildhall. Kenneth Clarke had run a disap- pointing trial gallop on the previous evening, reading them a lecture full of motherhood and apple pie but short on economics. Hezza, by contrast, got off to a flyer: 'I have read the quite wide specula- tion, of a largely predictable nature, designed to sustain headlines for which there is no foundation.' Gosh, you mean about that nice Mr Major and the, er, lead- ership? No, about my new white paper, due on Monday — all about competitiveness, and meant as a sort of prospectus for the second half of this Government's life, if it has one. Does it herald the return of the big public spenders? No, no — as the Chancellor could tell you, they never went away. So are you still planning to intervene before breakfast? Not exactly — but the Government does so much already, and affects the creators of wealth in so many ways, that it needs a policy for doing it, and the rest of us need to know what that is. Any hints? Well, he said, the CBI has come up with some useful ideas (that would make a change) and so has the Commons Committee on Trade and Industry. It wants investors to be forced to take a long view of industry, with penalties for switching, obstructions to takeovers, and less money Coming back. Stephen Dorrell of the Trea- sury complains that dividends are being wasted on shareholders. All this would leave directors in hog heaven, wallowing in cash and spared the tedious obligations that go with it, but would (my City friends thought) be less pleasing to investors, who might even put their money somewhere else. They think that unstable policies make for short-term responses, and that the biggest short-termists are in Westminster and Whitehall. They would rather hear of plans to get the public sector off the econo- my's back and out of its way, but they do not look for that to Prezza Hezza.
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