IDS takeover

Alex Brummer, City Editor, The Daily Mail

Dear Mr Brummer,

You are sufficiently old to remember C Gordon Tether who wrote almost exclusively in the FT about inflation and how it was generated by the mishandling of the money supply some fifty years ago. In the end Tether got the bullet since his work, although sound, was so repetitive. He sued the FT declaring that he was entitled to be published. This was pure bollocks and the FT stoutly and effectively rebutted him. I think Tether had just gone barmy.

In the same vein, much that you write seems sound to me. But in the matter of IDS I think you are barmy. At no point in today’s op-ed screed offered  by you do you pinpoint any threat to the British public by Kretinsky’s takeover of IDS.

You make so many blunders that it would be a waste of my time to detail them. They are so obvious. The silliest argument is that Henry VIII founded Royal Mail and therefore IDS should not be taken over by a foreigner. But the central silly argument is that Kretinsky’s takeover vehicle will be burdened by debt to the point where poor trading could cause the failure of Royal Mail to deliver anything on time ever. In fact, as a moment’s thought will show, poor trading will only emerge in all probability if Kretinsky has failed correctly to judge future performance. He will thereby have given IDS shareholders a lot of money that he should not have given – and that includes members of the CWU. Indeed, to style this takeover as economic vandalism is completely mad.

The only point that really must be made is that the crippling lunacy of the Universal Service Obligation really must stop. But you do not make it.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Cawkwell