If the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, has a fault – and it’s by no means clear that Jonny thinks he does have a fault – it’s that he’s too trusting. Who wouldn’t have believed that Jingye, the Chinese owners of British Steel, had been just too busy to get round to doing a deal to keep open the Scunthorpe blast furnaces? That they had been out and about enjoying the good weather and had missed the government’s increasingly desperate calls. After all, the Chinese government has never had anything but the interests of the British people at heart.
To say that the recall of parliament was a sign of panic is something of an understatement. This was the first Saturday the Commons had been summoned back from recess since the Falklands war in 1982. You couldn’t help feeling this was a crisis that could have been dealt with much earlier.
