There’s one way to save Arm from Nvidia

Beyond that, the Government is fairly impotent. There is no British version of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, an inter-agency body that has shown it has no qualms about preventing deals that threaten the national interest.

So if Dominic Cummings really is serious about creating the next Apple or Facebook on these shores, as the only true leader in its field, Arm offers far and away the best chance.

But instead of risking further damage to this country’s standing on the world stage with interventionary measures, Business Secretary Alok Sharma should come up with an all-British solution.

The obvious one has already been suggested by the company’s joint founder Hermann Hauser: a listing on the London stock exchange with investors from across the globe invited to buy shares.

It would give the fund managers that rolled over when Softbank came knocking in 2016, a chance to redeem their imprudence by backing it again. The capital raised could be ploughed back into its Cambridge base in the same way that Nvidia has promised to do.

There could even be a joint venture with its California rival to soften the blow of losing out. And in case no one has noticed, technology companies are fetching pretty rich valuations right now.

But the Government needs to move with uncharacteristic speed or the opportunity risks being lost forever.

Victory for the little guy

In a roll call of unpopular professions, insurance salesmen must rank somewhere above estate agents and the taxman but below dentists and motorcycle couriers.

Or at least they did before the pandemic. After hundreds of thousands of small business owners were denied payouts on so-called business interruption claims triggered by Covid-19, insurers might find their approval rating has slipped even further.

So a High Court ruling against eight big insurers including Hiscox and RSA that argued that losses caused by the pandemic were excluded in most cases, will feel like a real victory for the little guy.

The judgment found that most, though not all, of the disease clauses in the sample do provide cover, prompting expectations of reimbursements for as many as 370,000 firms.

The bill could be as high as £1.2bn and yet that’s still only a fraction of the hit expected from coronavirus.

Insurance market Lloyd’s of London expects to pay out around £5bn this year as a result of Covid, once travel-related claims and events cancellations are included.

There’s a “be careful what you wish for” message here in terms of what it could mean for higher premiums but even Lloyd’s boss John Neal has admitted that a few billion pounds isn’t much given the scale of the pandemic. Sympathy will be in very short supply.