Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City Editor and is the man who gets the City talking in his weekly City A.M. column.
This week he tackles Labour and the Tories’ attempts to win over business, IP Group investors and Thames Water. Let battle commence. Rishi Sunak’s decision to call a snap summer general election achieved a rare thing in politics: uniting business leaders , economists and his own (diminishing) ranks of MPs in bemusement.
Coming the day after statistics revealed inflation coming back to within reach of the Bank of England’s two per cent remit, the Prime Minister seemingly presumed this provided sufficient ballast to bolster his flagging electoral hopes. Yet that number pales into insignificance compared to where most homeowners are feeling the pinch right now: lofty interest rates. Why not wait until one, or maybe two, rate cuts by the Bank of England had fed through to consumers’ pockets? The answer lies in Sunak’s belief that delaying the election further would merely be storing up bad news.
Far from ‘stopping the boats’, the illegal immigration tide is likely to worsen in the second half of the year, while seasonal patterns of demand on NHS resources might mean a summer poll dilutes one headache for the Tories. The campaign may be at an embryonic stage, but it has already produced an inversion of the usual electoral status quo: it is Labour, rather than the Tories, making the running in terms of business support. This week’s letter demanding a lon.
