Friday High Five – blowing our own trumpet for once

It’s not often we blow our own trumpet at TheBusinessDesk.com, but I reckon our Budget coverage this week was of a really high quality.

Each of our journalists, across our five regions, picked their own highlights, but as a collective we looked at different aspects of Jeremy Hunt’s prickly and partisan speech for traces of a coherent policy narrative.

In this corner of the country we had a great story about Astra Zeneca’s new vaccines plant in Liverpool that Neil Hodgson applied himself to with his typically thorough application of knowledge and context.

I had my ear bent by Sacha Lord, not for what was in Hunt’s Budget, but what was left out – what he sees as an abandonment of the nation’s hospitality sector.

By 3pm we’d pretty much wrapped things up, but that’s when we started getting hot takes and detailed commentary from experts that carried on being sent way into the evening, thus far too late to make our on-the-spot coverage, but in truth there was very little that we missed as a result.

In the actual Budget document, not in his speech, there was a reversal of a policy on the definitions of ‘sophisticated investor’ that Angel investors had been lobbying for.

Claire Lewis told me about that when we had a planning call about our Rainmakers conference on 20 March.

We’re also cranking things up for our Business of the Year Awards in October – and the rigorous entry process is starting soon. You’ll be hearing more from me next week.

We’re also going to be starting our Rainmakers platform on Monday. It will be different in tone and style to the steady news output, but we think it will complement what we regularly provide.

As ever we carried some great high quality, high visibility stories this week, including Eden in Morecambe losing a champion, Gary Neville getting another new job, and the accession of Stockport’s Caroline Simpson to become the most powerful English civil servant outside of Whitehall.

Have a great weekend.