Cher Luc, you can't expel O'Kelly and the French will fine you if you try

CHRISTOPHER FILDES

The schoolboy O'Kelly's misconduct was celebrated in verse. His acts of resistance multiplied, until at last he was summoned to the headmaster's study. Then:

The Head expelled O'Kelly — but O'Kelly wouldn't go!

Luc (yes, it's him again) Vandevelde, the headmaster of Marks & Spencer, knows the feeling. He wants to shut up shop in France and Belgium, but will the staff let him? Not likely. They resist the suggestion, their governments back them, and if Mr Vandevelde hops on the Eurostar and comes to see them, he is in some danger of being kept in detention. His managers in France may get there first. A French court has fined M&S for 'manifestly illegal troublemaking' and told him to keep the shops open and keep the staff on. This, after all, is Continental Europe, where employment is protected, and where unemployment is high and inward investment less visible than it is in Britain, for all the supposed attraction of a single currency. These are cause and effect, though the centime has yet to drop. If contracts of employment have some kind of freehold built into them, employers think twice before handing them out. In the same way, as Milton Friedman explained, protected tenancies and rent restrictions help to keep housing in short supply. The point was borne in on Sir Brian Pitman (whose great innings at Lloyds TSB ends next week) when he found himself running a bank in France. Never again, so he said, would he take on a business which could not shed staff, or which, if it did shed them, still had to pay them. Mr Vandevelde might have a word with him in his study.

Hard cheese

I ADMIT it. I am in the criminal habit of ordering Lancashire cheese by the pound. I just hope that my cheesemonger is not run in. I suppress his name, for I am at least an accomplice in this flagrant use of Imperial measurement, so we might finish up in the same cell, where we would expect to enjoy some superior food parcels. If he wrapped his cheese in little packets, with Imperial and metric weights printed on them in equally legible letters, he might be safe (Tesco, which tried this, must hope so) but the fact is that he cuts the cheese and weighs it. This must put him on all fours with Steve Thobum. the Sunderland fruiterer who sold bananas by the pound and now stands con victed of breaking the Weights and Measures Act of 1995. In a free market, and, for that matter, in a free country, if I want to buy cheese by the pound and my cheesemonger sells it, that is our business and not the police's. It is not from his benevolence, as Adam Smith so nearly said, that I expect my dinner — but, as I was arguing last week, governments fly to keep Smith and his principles out of the food market, preferring to regulate it, direct it, manipulate it and police it. I am for bringing his principles back.

Past master

GEORGE BULL, editor, writer and polymath, died at the weekend, just short of his half-century in City journalism, which must have sharpened his pen when he was translating Machiavelli's II Principe. Here he is on governments which put themselves forward as caring, sharing and spending: 'A prince acting in that fashion will soon be forced to lay excessive burdens on the people, to impose extortionate taxes, and to do everything else he can to raise money. This will start to make his subjects hate him.' And here is Robert Maxwell as Pope: 'Alexander VI never did anything, or thought of anything, other than deceiving men, and he always found victims for his deceptions. There never was a man so ready to swear to the truth of something, who would honour his word less. None the less, his deceptions always had the result he intended, because he was a past master of the art.' Thank you, George.

Site for sore eyes

MARCONI the company wants us to think of Marconi the man. Read all about him on an expensive new website, described as a blend of Bauhaus and Constructivism. Will it tell us about the ministers who bought Marconi shares before the announcement of government contracts? Perhaps not, for that was a long time ago and the idea is to make him stand for enterprise and determination, which are suitable corporate qualities. This is the company which, when Lord Weinstock reigned over it, was known as GEC. His successor, Lord Simpson, was anxious to show that from now on things would be different. No more boring old government contracts, no more mountains of cash piling up. He sold the defence business to British Aerospace, bought in America, and turned GEC into a whizzy new telecoms company, for which Marconi would be the perfect name. It turned out to have hit the top of the market in telecoms. The shares have been wretched, and this week Marconi announced that it was laying off staff. Moral: at times like these, boredom can be a suitable corporate quality.

Bankers' lib

I HAD not expected to sympathise with the protesters who are trying to put Huntingdon Life Sciences out of business, but to be locked up in the Tower — more precisely, the 41st floor of the Canary Wharf Tower — is a cruel and unusual punishment. They brought it on themselves, it must be said. The Bank of New York has a tenuous connection with Huntingdon, so they moved into one of its meeting rooms, and could be heard within it, shouting. Nothing new about that, but they may now have realised that is how some people live. Forget the beagles, free the bankers.

By the Nine Gods

I DON'T know how Chiantishire is going to get along without us. It can have seen no such exodus since Lars Porsena of Clusium marched on Rome:

The vineyards of Arretium This year old men shall reap, This year young boys in Umbro Shall plunge the struggling sheep... .

This year Tony Blair will surely pledge to help our struggling sheep-farmers by spending his holidays among them, thus showing that Britain is open for business and setting an example to us all. My own list of patriotic destinations for the summer includes Glyndebourne, Ascot, Garsington. Goodwood and York. I shall start planning when I return from a fact-finding visit to Italy.