At a tense meeting with senior civil servants on the afternoon of 29 January, the UK chair of AstraZeneca, Shaun Grady, pulled the plug on a planned £450m expansion of its childhood flu vaccine factory in Merseyside – bringing a year and a half of negotiations to an abrupt halt.
The decision, announced publicly two days later, came just hours after the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had singled out Britain’s biggest drugmaker as one of the country’s “great companies” in her long-awaited speech on kickstarting UK growth.
