Image of the week: Jetting off
Monday: Take the private jet up to Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to announce more than 100 new drilling licences to extract as much oil and gas as possible from the North Sea. Tuesday: A spot of pint-pulling plus a quick pub game in west London during a visit to the Great British Beer Festival.
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak looked thoroughly demob happy in his eclectic final days at work before escaping for his first family holiday in almost four years – a sentence that almost guarantees some massive national crisis is about to blow up in Britain, forcing his return. (A previous attempt at an overseas break as a then backbench MP in September 2022 lasted just 15 hours before Queen Elizabeth died.)
Politically, it makes sense to disappear from the scenes just days after unveiling a “climate crisis, what climate crisis?” North Sea “maxing out” policy that even some Conservative MPs think is a bit controversial. Chris Skidmore, a former science minister, said Sunak’s bid to mark historic global heatwaves with a fossil fuel push was “on the wrong side of history” and, perhaps more relevantly to Sunak’s priorities at the moment, “on the wrong side of modern voters”.
In the short term, Sunak’s “energy security” plan may prove good news for Just Stop Oil, further legitimising as it does the climate activist group’s tactics while doing the opposite for the credibility of YouTuber-led counter-protest group, Just Stop P***ing Everyone Off.
In numbers: Tequila!
9%
Rise in net beer sales for global drinks giant Diageo in the year to the end of June, thanks to price increases and a “strong” performance for our old friend Guinness. Not bad, but . . .
19%
Diageo’s tequila net sales grew this much in the 12-month period, with volumes up 10 per cent, making the alcohol behemoth very happy indeed.
20%
Luxury tequila brand Don Julio, which Diageo acquired in 2015, has been the star performer, with net sales swelling 20 per cent. In North America, tequila sales volumes are surging, with the popularity of the drink fuelled by a spate of celebrity endorsements.
Getting to know: Reed Jobs
Thanks to the existence of a recruitment company called Reed, Reed Jobs has one of those special un-Googleable names. The son of late Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs and his philanthropist widow Laurene Powell Jobs have, however, climbed up a few search rankings this week after launching a venture capital firm to invest in new cancer treatments.
Jobs (31), whose father died from pancreatic cancer in 2011, has named the firm Yosemite after the national park in California where his parents got married. It is a spin-off from Powell Jobs’s philanthropic organisation Emerson Collective, where in recent years Reed Jobs has led the healthcare division.
Yosemite has already closed a fund of $200 million (€183 million) in its bid to “lead the next chapter in the fight against cancer”. Named after Reed College in Portland, Oregon – which his father attended in 1972 before dropping out – Jobs told the New York Times he never wanted to be a venture capitalist but he has now come round to the idea that this is how he can make “a tremendous difference”.
The list: That’s Bidenomics
Fitch Ratings’s move to downgrade the US’s sovereign credit rating by one notch from AAA to AA+ this week, dubbed an “arbitrary” and “outdated” assessment by US treasury secretary Janet Yellen, was certainly unfortunate timing for the White House, which in the days before had been busy rallying the Democratic troops to spread the word on “Bidenomics”.
1. Kamala Harris: “That’s no accident. That’s Bidenomics,” tweeted vice-president Harris as she cited strong job gains in US manufacturing, construction and R&D since Joe Biden became president.
2. Gina Raimondo: Biden’s commerce secretary has also been charged with reclaiming a tag often used by Republicans and their supporters as a slur. “Bidenomics is working,” is her conclusion to recent good news for the US economy, including easing inflation.
3. Jared Bernstein: The White House’s chair of the council of economic advisers gamely told Fox News’s Shannon Bream that “it takes a while for these sentiments to reach folks” but with Bidenomics now “in action”, the US was “starting to see some results” on consumer confidence.
4. Isabel Guzman: Biden’s administrator of the Small Business Administration is among those who have been on a Bidenomics-themed “tour” in recent weeks, as the Biden-Harris re-election campaign gets under way in earnest.
5. Elizabeth Warren: Trickle-down economics slashes taxes for billionaires and giant corporations, according to the US senator, but Bidenomics is about investing in growing the middle class and taking on corporate greed. “The choice is clear,” she tweeted. If only it was.
