The idea that business leaders can transform the way government works didn’t start with Elon musk, but success in politics demands different skills to entrepreneurship, says Eliot Wilson

Business feels let down by the current government. Before the general election, Sir Keir Starmer and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, staged an updated performance of the late John Smith’s “prawn cocktail offensive” of the early 1990s, when he worked to reassure and woo the City of London that Labour could be trusted with the nation’s finances.

Starmer and his colleagues tried hard. Former Thatcher devotee and friend of Liz Truss, PR trouper Iain Anderson, found his principles pulling him in a new direction and was commissioned to review Labour’s relations with business. The result was the anodyne A New Partnership, which said very little but said it over 36 glossy pages. The party also published Financing Growth, a plan to support the financial services sector. Tax rises were ruled out, feathers diligently smoothed. Everything would be all right.

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