Morning Call: ISA be so lucky

Jeremy Hunt is right about the British economy – but he can’t fix it.

Will

Good morning. Will here. Thanks to all those who subscribed yesterday. Like Schrodinger’s cat, the “British ISA” announced by Jeremy Hunt in his Budget speech this week can be described as existing in two states: it is simultaneously a good idea, and as useful as a chocolate teapot. More below.

Then Will Lloyd writes on Tom Burgis’s new book Cuckooland, which shows quite how much the power to shape the UK, and the truth, can be bought. Here’s a snippet.

“For two-and-a-half years,” writes Burgis of Amersi, “I have been trying to figure out who this man really is.” The answer, on this evidence, is the spirit of a rapacious and cynical age. Mohamed Amersi was born in Mombasa in 1960. His family’s roots were twisted around the old disasters and triumphs of the British empire in Africa, the Middle East and the Raj. They bought and sold things. They moved wherever money demanded they go. Like them, Mohamed would develop a well-honed instinct for commerce. Unlike them, he was sent off to Merchant Taylors’ in the 1970s, a not-quite-public school founded by a stern man in a ruff in 1561.

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