The morality of begging for trade with Saudi and Qatar

Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’.

A ticket to Cop27 is a virtue signal in itself. But attendance at last week’s FII, an annual showcase for progressive sovereign spending within Mohammed bin Salman’s otherwise medieval Saudi state, is a moral conundrum. Just as the UK relies on Qatar for liquefied natural gas supplies while our dignitaries queue to cite the emirate’s human rights record as reason not to go to the World Cup there, so we beg the Saudis to buy gilts and British-made arms but we don’t want to be seen cosying up to the regime that butchered Jamal Khashoggi.

The US – with a starry line-up led by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, the billionaire investment guru Ray Dalio and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – seemed to have no trouble burying its scruples in the desert sand; the Chinese delegation, one assumes, had none to bury. As for the UK, our only big name on the platform was the former chancellor George Osborne, bravely reassuring anyone who would listen that ‘Britain’s back on track’.

My man in the canapé catering truck texts to tell me there was a rich moment of comedy when proceedings were interrupted by an unscheduled invitation for the assembled financial titans to dine with MBS himself – prompting an undignified scramble through extra security to bag seats in the motorcade, which duly delivered them all to the wrong palace. Several hot and hungry hours later, their reward was a brief shake of the ruler’s allegedly bloodstained hand. But that’s how the business gets done.

Sane hands?

Donald Trump declaring himself ‘very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands’ tells us all we need to know about the completion of Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of the San Francisco-based social media site from which the former president was ‘permanently suspended’ after the storming of the Capitol in January last year. Having launched his quixotic bid in April, supposedly in the cause of free speech, Musk tried to pull out in July but was sued by Twitter and forced by a court in Delaware, where the company is registered, to see the deal through. Meanwhile other leading tech shares have been plunging – including Musk’s own Tesla electric car company, down by a third – and banks that agreed to back the Twitter bid with some $12.5 billion of debt are reportedly wishing they hadn’t.

Does living in a silo of libertarian billionaires while basking in the adulation of millions of online followers make Musk a safer custodian for this powerful channel of communication than the top executives he fired after closing the deal, or the public shareholders he has replaced? Of course it doesn’t. Should he have taken my advice in April and stayed focused on Tesla? Of course he should. Will financiers and co-investors turn against him? Within months, I’d guess. And will the world be a happier place if Twitter self-destructs under his ownership? Yes, until something even more corrosive of truth and decency replaces it.

Flat battery

Good news: Britishvolt, the venture that’s trying to build a £3.8 billion, 3,000-job electric--vehicle battery ‘gigafactory’ at Blyth in Northumberland, did not die on Monday night. Despite rumours during the day of its impending demise, cash was secured from unnamed sources to keep the business afloat, at least for the time being.

Parachuted into the old coal port of Blyth (in the Labour stronghold of Wansbeck that very nearly fell to the Tories in 2019), the Britishvolt project was hailed – or perhaps cursed – by Kwasi Kwarteng when he was business secretary as ‘exactly what levelling up looks like’. It boasted ‘world-leading lithium--ion battery technologies’ and a target to begin production in 2023. The investment group Abrdn is a backer and the commodity giant Glencore a ‘strategic partner’.

But having struggled to raise continuing funding and parted company in August with the founder and chief executive Orral Nadjari, it reached the cliff edge this week when the new Business Secretary, Grant Shapps, refused to release £30 million of promised government funding ahead of schedule. According to one report, he found Britishvolt’s management ‘totally chaotic’.

So the bad news is that the survival prospects of the UK’s boldest stake in the global EV battery market look shaky at best. An industrial buyer – almost certainly not British – may be its only hope. Nissan of Japan is building its own battery factory 20 miles south at Sunderland; talks have been held with Tata of India, parent of Jaguar Land Rover, but evidently with no result. I see no pictures of Chinese delegations on Britishvolt’s website, but let’s hope that’s not where salvation has to come from.

Ghoulish binge

The horror of Saturday’s crowd stampede in the Itaewon nightlife district of Seoul – where I was an occasional partygoer myself, many years ago – makes flippant Halloween observations distasteful. But before I’d heard that dreadful news, I was making my way across London’s West End through throngs of scary costumes, masks and black-eyed maquillage.

On an unseasonally warm evening, families with half-term children filled every pavement; box-office tills were ringing; bars and bistros were rammed, with queues round the block for the most fashionable places. We read – and some of us write – every day about the dark winter to come, the tax rises, the fuel bills, the strikes, the NHS chaos. But younger consumers, I sense, may be seeing it differently: an opportunity for one last ghoulish binge from now till Christmas.