It would be bold and it would place a burden of expectation on him. Surely No 7 (where Ian Botham learned his trade and where, indeed, he batted against Australia when he became a legend in 1981) would be more appropriate at first. That may be so but there is no better chance for Flintoff to learn the perils and joys of No 6 than now.Having dealt with Banquo, sorry Stewart, Graveney and his men will fill in the rest of the batting. This is simple at the start of the series – Hussain at three, Graham Thorpe at four, Mark Ramprakash at five – and how spiffing it would be if that were still so after the Ashes have been regained in two years.The seam bowling places are between Alan Mullally, Alex Tudor, Chris Silverwood, Dean Headley and Andrew Caddick. Headley has had a woeful time this summer, poor chap, Caddick (42 wickets) has been in incisive form as has Tudor (38 wickets at at a good rate of one every 40 balls). Silverwood played one Test two winters ago in Zimbabwe, has known some hard times since but has stuck at it He is in form.

Graveney, incidentally, wants to pick more bowlers in the squad than might be strictly necessary so as their fitness can be tested.No doubt there will have to a spinner. Phil Tufnell could be recalled yet again, for he is the best in the country and Hussain has made it clear he intends to embrace what might be perceived as troublesome players. But Ashley Giles, peculiarly, has as many wickets and can bat.This is a big chance for England. Not only New Zealand but South Africa, West Indies, Pakistan and Australia will be waiting to see if they dare take it.Possible squad: N Hussain (Essex, capt); A J Stewart, M A Butcher, G P Thorpe (all Surrey); M R Ramprakash (Middlesex); A Flintoff (Lancashire); C M W Read (Notts); A J Tudor (Surrey); A F Giles (Warwickshire); C E W Silverwood (Yorkshire); A D Mullally (Leicestershire); A R Caddick (Somerset); D W Headley (Kent).Hussain interview, page 14.

BEWILDERMENT HAS been something of a common sporting emotion just recently. South Africa managing to run themselves out of town in the World Cup was a moment never to be forgotten, and maybe we can add Pakistan’s final flop to that. Certainly we should include the collapse of Martina Hingis at Wimbledon. Only a cold heart, or the most obnoxious Aussie yobbo, could have felt nothing for the broken Hingis, just a slip of a girl exposed to the toughest character test so often failed by players of more mature years. She was coming off a mental hiding last time out, hurting and freezing trying to handle it.
The demise of Hingis raises a worthwhile debating point about our expectation of sporting stars, particularly the young ones.

We are too unforgiving.Shane Warne has just survived a nightmare which not too many sporting heroes might have got through: a shoulder operation, a finger operation, then being dropped after coming back. Add to that some domestic pressures: of the last 10 months he’s been at home with his young family for just four, during which time his wife has given birth to his second child whom, when able to drag himself away from a crocodile line of tickertape parades, he has only just laid eyes on.Sometime in the middle of all that, just before the World Cup, the Australian vice-captain received a letter from his captain, Steve Waugh. It wasn’t hate mail, although scuttlebutt said the relationship had been icy since Waugh had agreed to Stuart MacGill getting the nod over Warne for the deciding Test against the West Indies in Antigua.Think what you will of Waugh as a tactician, as a charismatically challenged character, but when it comes to taking the tough decision he has no equal And that was a tough call. Warne had taken 300-plus Test wickets and had been hailed by Sir Donald Bradman as “the best thing to happen to cricket in a quarter of a century”.Warne admits the decision “deeply hurt”. Fair enough too, but we could have done without the special press conference, a sort of majestic overkill, to announce we were considering taking our ball and going home, early retirement. So, Warne was classified as stroppy, yet wasn’t he merely reflecting the public’s quite fickle attitude to him?How incongruous was it that in the preliminary stages of the World Cup the crowd booed when the ball was tossed to the world’s greatest leg-spinner yet, at the end of a dazzling first over Warne was accorded a standing ovation?Steve Waugh’s letter contained two simple messages.

They failed to bring many positives out of their match against Australia, but they can be sure of one thing – they can’t go into the World Cup hoping to dominate up front. They must brush up their running game, and that demands the return of Will Greenwood in the centre and nailing Jonny Wilkinson to the outside-half position once and for all.The late try from Matt Perry, one of England’s few successes on the day, made the scoreline look fairly respectable, and I didn’t think David Wilson’s try should have been allowed, but they mustn’t kid themselves. They were convincingly beaten.This is all the harder for them to bear because for the first half-hour it looked as if everything was going their way. Their forwards were strong and solid and in a mood to give the Australians nothing but grief, the defence was aggressive and organised and when Perry opened the scoring after 26 minutes everything looked great.Then suddenly they lost it and within 10 minutes Australia had claimed control. There were a few encouraging flurries from England in the second half but their game was a mess in so many areas. The line-out revealed serious weaknesses I didn’t think were possible, and the kicking out of hand was worryingly aimless, players were kicking for no obvious reason apart from a lack of a better idea.And, for the life of me, I can’t understand what Clive Woodward is trying to do with the switching of roles between Wilkinson and Mike Catt. There is absolutely no logic to it and I’ve never known such a ploy to work at this level.

I wrote last year that Wilkinson had to be given the No 10 shirt and persevered with through the Five Nations to give him the chance to become the controlling influence. Now the World Cup is almost upon us and he has little time to establish the confidence you need to play well in that position. But do it he must if England are to rebuild the faith and optimism they will need.The two tries that Ben Tune scored in the last 10 minutes of the first half were like watching a nightmare unfold. Scoring tries from set-pieces is very difficult these days but Australia were allowed to do it twice within 10 minutes. And in both Wilkinson was occupying the centre role, when he should be organising the defence from the outside-half position and nowhere else.

I shall be very surprised, shocked even, if they ever make that mistake again.It is a bit late for England to be learning lessons as basic as these. Whereas Australia will now go confidently into the Tri-Nations series, where their game is going to be considerably honed and hardened, England are going back to the drawing board without much opportunity to put things right under battle conditions.. ENGLAND FAILED to bring many positives out of this game but they can be sure of one thing – they can’t go into the World Cup hoping to dominate up front. They must brush up their running game, and that demands the return of Will Greenwood in the centre and nailing Jonny Wilkinson to the outside-half position once and for all. The late try from Matt Perry, one of England’s few successes on the day, made the scoreline look fairly respectable, and I didn’t think Wilson’s try should have been allowed, but they mustn’t kid themselves. They were convincingly beaten.
This is all the harder for them to bear because for the first half-hour it looked as if everything was going their way.

BEFORE THE start of the first Emsley Carr Mile, in the 1953 British Games, the man blessed with the widest ever range of running talents was introduced to the August bank holiday crowd at the White City Stadium. Paavo Nurmi, 56 at the time, was paraded on a lap of honour around the West London track by open-topped car. At the peak of his physical powers, between 1920 and 1932, the finest of the Flying Finns won Olympic gold medals at distances ranging from 1,500m to 10,000m and broke world records from the mile up to to the 20,000m. The aficionados packed into White City must have thought athletics would never see his like again. But the crowd at Gateshead International Stadium this afternoon will see a track phenomenon whose spread of running ability is equal to that of the late, great Nurmi. Haile Gebrselassie is the reigning world champion, Olympic champion and world-record holder at 10,000m He is also the world indoor champion at 1,500m.

In today’s Gateshead Classic he will be striving to reinforce his reputation at the lower end of his scale. At 26, the Ethiopian will be running his first ever mile race It will not, however, be just any mile race. Oslo’s Dream Mile may have risen to become the world’s premier four-lap contest but it does not have a history as rich as the Emsley Carr Mile.
It has been won by eight Olympic champions – Murray Halberg, Kip Keino, John Walker, Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe, Said Aouita, William Tanui and Venuste Niyongabo – and by six men who have broken the world mile record: Walker, Ovett, Coe, Derek Ibbotson, Jim Ryun and Filbert Bayi. It has also been responsible for some significant miling breakthroughs.It was in the 1976 Emsley Carr Mile, in the British International Games at Crystal Palace that Coe broke four minutes for the first time. The 19-year-old Loughborough University student clocked 3min 58.4 sec in a race won by Dave Moorcroft, the present chief executive of UK Athletics.

And it was in the 1978 race, in the British Meat Games at Crystal Palace, that Steve Cram first made his mark, shattering Ryun’s world age-best for a 17-year-old with a time of 3:57.4 in fourth place – just behind the 30-year-old Brendan Foster, who will be alongside him in the BBC television commentary box at Gateshead today.Cram went on to become one of the all-time greats of the mile but never managed to win an Emsley Carr Mile. That Gebrselassie, who considers himself primarily a 10,000m runner, could achieve a four-lap feat which eluded the miler made in Hebburn underlines the extraordinary breadth of his talent. He is certainly capable of adding his name to the illustrious list of Emsley Carr winners, even though his rivals this afternoon will include the two leading latter-day Britons at the distance, John Mayock and Tony Whiteman. In winning the world 1,500m title in Maebashi three months ago Gebrselassie was too quick for Laban Rotich, the Kenyan who won the Commonwealth 1,500m final ahead of Mayock and Whiteman in Kuala Lumpur last September. He has also run 3:31.76 indoors for 1,500m, a time which roughly equates to a mile in 3:49.8.”I really don’t know how fast I can run the mile,” Gebrselassie maintained as he prepared to leave his Dutch training base, in Uden, for Tyneside. “I don’t think I could break the world record but I think I could run a quick time.

They bring much colour and glamour but at a very high cost to themselves and the integrity of the sport.The recent history of tennis is stained by the memories of young players whose adolescence was scarred by the pressures and the exploitation. But the lessons of Tracey Austin and Jennifer Capriati have been ignored The situation has worsened. The media’s contribution to these cruel pressures cannot be overlooked.Some of the press conferences at Wimbledon last week were appalling. Martina Hingis suffered a defeat that must have been a nightmare for the world’s top-rated player, but under a barrage of impertinent questions about her relationship with her mother she displayed tremendous dignity. An old hand at 18.Anna Kournikova has endured similar interrogation about whether she has a boyfriend. There must be a limited number of us who care, but the trivialities are ruthlessly pursued none the less. We would be more sympathetic, however, if the young Russian’s advisers concentrated a little more on protecting her innocent beauty than projecting it.

A touch more modesty in the dress designing department would not go amiss.Maybe our curiosity is so addicted to the finer details attached to these particular sportswomen – down to which side of the bed they sleep on, if you get my drift – that we can no longer do without it. That’s sad because, apart from any other consideration, all this crap gets in the way of the tennis.It is difficult enough to concentrate on all the games played in the first week without all these frivolous distractions. If the senior players could lift their eyes above the money question and examine the overall health of their sport they might see a case for persuading Wimbledon and the other Grand Slam events that one way to re-focus our minds on the game would be to bring in a minimum age limit of, say, 17.That would mean that the older players would last longer at the top and the younger ones would be allowed to develop in a more homely and less damaging environment. It would not hurt the game, or the youngsters, if parents and other predators had to wait longer for their meal tickets to blossom.Meanwhile, one way to solve the equal-pay dispute is to establish who is the dominant sex. We’d have to take the risk of what a month-long Wimbledon would do to the suicide rate but it would be an interesting experiment if instead of the men’s and women’s tournaments being staged simultaneously they were held one after the other This would serve at least three purposes The real fans would have more chance of getting tickets. We’d have a clearer and less hurried view of the tennis and we would see which brand of the game was more popular. In other words, which gender engenders the money.But the only real answer is gradually to end the division between men and women.

If one Grand Slam, the US Open, could pay equal prize money for women for a number of years I don’t see why any other Grand Slam shouldn’t, especially nowadays. I think the women’s tour is more interesting and just stronger than ever. It has nothing to do with being greedy, or that we are complaining about not being paid well enough.JOHN CURRYALL ENGLAND CLUB CHAIRMANWe address the prize money issue every year and we try to be fair, reasonable and rational. At their own tournaments, the women pay themselves on average less than 50 per cent of the men’s prize money, and they both play the best of three sets. The women players have every right to request increases in prize money, but it seems reasonable that they achieve this from their own tournaments first. With the second highest prize money in the world, Wimbledon already demonstrates equality, unlike the women’s own tournaments.FREW McMILLANFIVE-TIME DOUBLES CHAMPIONIt’s not justified at the moment, although I could sanction equal prize money from the quarter-finals on.

There’s just not enough quality in the women’s game, even though they’ve made huge strides in the last few years. Equal money has been attained at events like the US Open because of a huge political lobby The majority of spectators come to see the men. But it will be difficult for Wimbledon to hold out and what’s the difference in terms of how much extra it would cost? So in many ways it’s political against principle.JOHN McENROETHREE-TIME CHAMPIONThe old arguments are no longer relevant. The men play best of five sets at Grand Slam events, while the women play best of three. So what? The fact is that fans buy tickets to watch great tennis played by great personalities in big events And the women are selling the tickets. As I walked round during the French Open, three out of every five people I spoke with asked me about the women’s matches. They are accessible, with the logical result that we know and care about them The men need to do the same.STEVE TONGUE.

A repeat may be on the cards with Happy Valentine also in the race, but the competition is stronger than last year with Croco Rouge and Shiva, plus the three-year-olds Fantastic Light and Saffron Walden entered.The proposed target for Godolphin’s Derby disappointment Dubai Millennium, who misses this afternoon’s Grand Prix de Paris, will be another 10-furlong race, the Prix Eugene Adam at Maisons-Laffitte next month. The colt’s absence today leaves Brancaster, 10th in the Derby, as the sole British raider at Longchamp. Peter Chapple-Hyam’s charge faces seven rivals, including French Derby flops Slickly and Gracioso.. FROM NORTH London to South America is not a journey many Premiership footballers undertake when they finish the season.

But this is no exotic holiday for Nolberto Solano, and while most of the Newcastle United midfielder’s team-mates continue to sun themselves after their FA Cup final defeat at Wembley last month, the Peruvian has travelled 6,000 miles to Paraguay for his next slice of football. On Tuesday, Peru play their opening match in the Copa America, and Solano, 24, after becoming the first Peruvian to play in the FA Cup final, has a chance to put that chastening defeat by Manchester United behind him.
The man whose wedding was televised and whose face is on stamps in Peru helped provide a competitive start to the final but he acknowledges that Alex Ferguson’s treble-winning men were the better team: “Being in the Cup final was very important but people only remember you if you win – Manchester United are a great team.” Six weeks on he has to raise himself for another battle on the side of the underdogs. For Newcastle read Peru, for Manchester United, read Brazil, the current holders.The Copa America, South America’s equivalent of the European Championship, is played every two years – Solano played four years ago in Uruguay, but did not feature in 1997 as Peru concentrated on qualifying for the World Cup, failing only on goal difference after a gruelling programme of 16 matches.Now Solano, bought last July by then Newcastle manager Kenny Dalglish for pounds 2.5m from Boca Juniors, where he played alongside his boyhood idol, Diego Maradona, is turning his attention to guiding his country through a tournament they have won only twice.Their first opponents are Japan (tournament guests), and they also play Bolivia and the hosts. That, as Solano explains, is a game already charged with more than a hint of revenge.

“We lost our game in Paraguay during the France 98 qualifiers, but it was a great atmosphere because of what was at stake. This time we play them again and that will mean full stadiums, and as Paraguay reached the last World Cup that will make everyone even more excited.”After experiencing an 80,000 crowd at Wembley, the salsa-dancing Solano is already looking forward to what he thinks will be an even hotter reception in Paraguay. “There will be an incredible atmosphere at the games,” says the man nicknamed Nobby by the Newcastle faithful. “The fans are very passionate, so there are still fences around the stadiums. In South America, there can be violence outside the stadiums especially after derby games. Chile are our greatest rivals and we could play them in the quarter-finals.”Solano sees similarities between the current Peru and Newcastle United sides, in that they are both steadily improving, but now the immediate task for him and his teammates is to try to revive memories of the side, inspired by Teofilio Cubillas, who won the Copa America in 1975 and three years later beat Scotland in reaching the last eight of the World Cup. “It will be hard but not impossible for Peru to reach the quarter-finals but everyone will have their strongest teams out this year,” Solano said.

The FTSE 100 ended 17.7 points better at 6,374.3 despite a wobbly opening for the Dow in New York, unsettled as it was by Microsoft’s legal troubles.The leading index was also boosted by BP Amoco, its biggest constituent. The oil giant flared 25p higher to 566p after good third-quarter results and a deal with the Alaskan government over its Arco acquisition. British Telecom fell 11.5p to 1,090.5p on fears that it might team up with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to bid for French conglomerate Vivendi. BT’s rivals were also caught up in the consolidation wave; Orange squeezed 41p higher to 1,606p on growing hopes that Mannesmann’s offer could be trumped by a bid by France Telecom and Vodafone AirTouch, 1p better at 318p. However, stronger rumours suggest that the pest control giant, 13.25p better at 220.5p at the start of an American roadshow, is working on a pounds 700m share buyback programme and, if anything, could be vulnerable to a takeover itself.The bid stories were not confined to food and pesticides. The story had a certain logic; according to the whispers, the leisure and TV giant is working on a split of its hotels and catering division from its media activities. If and when the carve- up happens, Granada will need to boost its food side and, at less than pounds 5bn, Compass would be a tasty and affordable morsel.Some stubborn dealers still believe that Compass could be sought by the business services group, Rentokil Initial.

The catering giant jumped 31p to 727.5p in good volume of nearly 4 million as buyers tucked into its shares. Traders were served an appetiser of rumours that trading in Compass’s main divisions is booming, but the main course was talk of a strike from a rival.
Freshly-baked stories suggested that Compass may be on the bid menu of Granada, 3p better at 513p. The long list of bid preys gained another name yesterday in Compass. Fund managers awash with cash are desperate to spot the next takeover targets and dealers are constantly being urged to pile into bid-friendly sectors.

The airline’s intention, says sales and marketing director David Magliano, is to expand the market: “In the States, low-cost airlines account for 25 per cent of all passenger journeys. There was also an unexpected benefit: people running small businesses identified with easyJet much more than with British Airways and British Midland.BA’s response showed how seriously Britain’s biggest airline takes the threats, and opportunities, of no-frills aviation. Lurid orange advertising hammered home the message that you could fly between England and Scotland for pounds 29. The paint job on the planes consisted of the easyJet telephone number.Initially, the intention was to create new leisure traffic, but business travellers soon saw the logic of flying for a quarter of the fare that the established airlines were asking. But safety was never negotiable: Southwest also happens to be the safest airline in the world. Having emulated the model, and nailing down the easyJet’s cost base as low as possible, it was necessary to create a market.

“All you had to do was compare what people paid in the US relative to what people paid in the UK and Europe, and I said to myself there must be money to be made here.”Southwest’s secret was hardly rocket science: it involved looking at each stage of the operation of an airline, and stripping out all but the essentials. The Greek shipping millionaire had travelled widely in the United States on board Southwest Airlines, which has been consistently profitable while sharply reducing fare levels on every route it serves. Between the English and Scottish capitals, there are now a dozen no-frills flights each way, each working day, operated by easyJet and its arch-rival Go. One-third of the passengers on board are business travellers.
November 1995 was when the aviation map of Britain was redrawn.

ROYAL BANK of Scotland yesterday gave its first formal notice that it may bid for NatWest, the high street bank, posting a merger notice with regulators. Despite the legal challenges it is facing, Microsoft commands as much as 90 per cent of the global market for personal computer operating systems.Even if action taken against Microsoft falls short of a full break-up, state and federal anti-trust regulators could seek fundamental changes in the way Microsoft does business, making a settlement improbable and setting the stage for an appeals process that could drag on for years.. For some time to come, people will need to be compatible with what Microsoft is doing anyway,” said Mr Philips.Analysts say there is no way of knowing at present whether the continuing litigation will actually help competitors to eat into Microsoft’s market domination in the long run. “By that time, it may not matter in a lot of the areas covered.”A court-ordered break-up of the world’s leading software company, although seen as highly unlikely, became more conceivable after Judge Jackson’s 207-page opinion was issued on Friday, backing the US government’s anti- trust regulators on nearly every point.Even in the long-shot scenario of a break-up, companies might not be able to shift enough funding into research and development fast enough to take huge chunks of market share, Mr Philips said.”There is a limit to what some of these companies can spend on R&D,” he said, adding that companies that are in alliances with Microsoft are not moving at this point to hedge their bets.”Most companies hedge anyway, and they have seen these anti-trust actions lag on for years before in other cases. Oracle gained $3/4 to $597/16 and Sun Microsystems gained $23/16 to $1117/8 in heavy trading volumes.”It could be positive for companies rallying at this point, although the timeframe for injunctive relief could be years away,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Chuck Philips.

“But we don’t know how they will be affected until a final determination is made.” Other analysts also cautioned that there was no way to predict the final outcome of the landmark case. However, some are expecting that Microsoft will ultimately prevail on appeal.
Red Hat (the largest distributor of the Linux operating system, considered to be an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows), the database software maker, Oracle, and the computer workstation developer, Sun Microsystems, were all regarded as possible beneficiaries of US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson’s ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly that has bullied competitors and harmed consumers.Red Hat shares gained $181/16 to $104 on Nasdaq. But Microsoft held firm; its stock quickly fell $7 but recovered to close in New York at $8915/16, down only $15/8, with five times the usual daily volume changing hands. “The decision is certainly unsettling the competitive landscape, and there is an additional focus and spotlight on Microsoft’s competitors,” said Hambrecht & Quist analyst, Christopher Galvin. Gallaher is eager to break out of its reliance on the declining UK market, but it was excluded from a flurry of tobacco dealmaking this year.Gallaher closed down 0.8 per cent at 365p yesterday.. MICROSOFT’S rivals were the immediate winners following Friday’s court ruling against the software giant, as its competitors in niche software markets saw their stocks rise yesterday.

Seita said Mr Comolli repeated the company’s commitment to a merger with Spanish tobacco group Tabacalera to form a new company, Altadis.But Seita also said that Altadis would be willing to examine other alliances, a remark analysts said could open the door to a future deal.”The interesting thing will be to see if this has flushed out any other bidders,” said Andrew Darke, tobacco industry analyst at Williams de Broe.Reports that British American Tobacco might pursue Gallaher have resurfaced after the Seita overture. “Gallaher will no longer be pursuing the possibility of making an offer for Seita,’” spokesman Ian Birks said after talks between the companies’ chiefs. “At a meeting today between the chairman of Gallaher and the president- directeur general of Seita, it has been made clear to Gallaher that the board and management team of Seita are not prepared to co-operate with Gallaher in the formulation of a recommended offer for Seita.”
The announcement sparked a brief rally in European tobacco stocks on speculation of a renewed wave of mergers and acquisitions.In Paris, Seita confirmed that its president, Jean-Dominique Comolli, had met Gallaher chairman Peter Wilson. Although the arrangements leave about pounds 500m for further deals, the priority will be to drag down the post-transaction gearing, which stands above 90 per cent, RMC says.”They’ve said that UK supply arrangements will stand. There may be other deals in the sector, but this is not yet the end of the world,” one analyst said.. GALLAHER GROUP, the largest UK cigarette maker, said yesterday it was backing away from a possible buyout offer for French rival Seita.

After yesterday’s announcement, RMC waded into the UK stock market, bringing its holding in Rugby to 19.9 per cent, including shareholdings already pledged to back its offer.Bob Lambourne, RMC finance director, said further Rugby shares could be bought after the go-ahead from Australian authorities, whose regulations cap RMC’s holdings at this stage.To cover the deal, the company has lined up a new pounds 2bn loan facility with Warburg Dillon Read, alongside pounds 350m in existing financing. Before the deal, RMC’s income was skewed towards aggregates (25 per cent) and concrete (33 per cent). After it, cement, concrete and aggregates will each account for about a third of operating profits.For now, the fate of the deal rests with Rugby shareholders and, possibly, competition authorities. In all, a combined RMC Rugby company would have about 20 million tonnes of annual cement capacity, compared with Holderbank, the global leader, which has about 85 million tonnes.The acquisition will help to balance RMC’s income streams more evenly between product lines, and spread its presence more uniformly across the globe. Rugby, which has off-loaded a string of non-core assets in recent months to focus on its building-material operations, has extensive cement interests in Australia and Poland. These could be added to RMC’s existing cement operations which span California, Latvia, Germany, Croatia and Poland.

The idea of “partnership” between business and government has strong “corporatist” under currents, and the Government appears more than willing to favour particular commercial interests over others for support in its social and educational aims.
On the other hand, the “rip-off” Britain campaign is plainly anti-corporatist in its objectives, as was the abolition of the tax credit on dividends, while quite a bit of Labour social policy is opposed by business large and small. Would it be corporatist in nature, with lots of supposed backing for wants of big business? Or would it be against the established bastions of industrial and commercial power, and through a vigorous competition policy and a pro-enterprise agenda promote the interests of the small businessman and the entrepreneur? Or might it even turn out to be anti business altogether?

In practice it has been a bit of all three. On current year profit forecasts of pounds 385m, the shares trade on a forward multiple of 11. That may seem cheap, but the rating reflects the challenges of ABF’s main markets and there seems little reason to buy the shares just now.. NOBODY WAS too sure how the new Labour government would treat business when it was elected. The 100-store chain saw profits rise by 87 per cent to pounds 43m and like-for-like sales grow by 20 per cent, around the best in the sector.

ABF has some stellar names such as Twinings tea and Silver Spoon sugar, but it also has a chunk of own-label business with the supermarkets, supplying products such as ice cream and biscuits. If these cannot be knocked into shape they will be sold.Some gems remain. The low-price format of the Penneys/Primark high street retail division is thriving in the present value-conscious climate. He is not expected to return to the business for several months, and the new chief executive, Peter Jackson, is running the show.Mr Jackson’s plan is to use the pounds 870m cash pile for more acquisitions after the pounds 450m special dividend this year. His targets are in the food ingredients sector, following the American Spi Holdings polyoils deal and the recent Rohn Enzymes acquisition. These businesses are in “added value” sectors where margins are less exposed to competitive pressures.Elsewhere, costs will be attacked, particularly in the underperforming parts of its grocery division. ABF’s share price has slumped from 638p to just 370p, a fall which has prompted the controlling Weston family to increase its holding from 61 to 63 per cent with the aim of increasing it further to 66 per cent.With the clouds gathering it was fortunate that Garry Weston had shaken up the board prior to his stroke in September.