CITY AND SUBURBAN
The English patient's in a bottomless hole so it's time to stop pouring
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Blame drifts around over Longbridge like a big black cloud, with warring cherubs puffing at the corners, each of them trying to make it rain on someone else. Stephen Byers wants to puff it towards the Bavari- ans at BMW who found a home for Rover without coming to the Department of Trade and Industry to tell him. (Well, would you put a deal at risk by trusting this government to keep a secret?) The Bavari- ans blame the British for not joining the euro, or rather for not devaluing the pound. They also blame themselves for not noticing that few people in Britain bought Rovers. Now the resourceful Geoffrey Robinson has found a way of blaming Peter Mandelson, who passed through the DTI before Mr Byers got there. He and his min- istry were too laid back, says Mr Robinson, writing in the New Statesman, which one of his companies publishes. Perhaps Rover should have followed TransTec, another of Mr Robinson's companies, which made motor components and moved to Northern Ireland, where it developed a terminal hole in its accounts. Perhaps what Rover needed was a good agent in Belgium, like Mr Robinson's generous friend Joska Bour- geois. None of this puffing will revive the hapless 'English patient' and none could. BMW turns out to have poured £3 billion into Rover, just as the British government had done before it. When you're in a hole, as Denis Healey said, stop digging — and when it's bottomless, stop pouring.
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