British go all French over Pfizer bid

How ironic that, as it squares up to the challenge of the anti-European Ukip in the forthcoming European elections, members of Britain's Conservative-led government should be donning the interventionist attire of the French, of all people.

After Labour leader Ed Milliband accused prime minister David Cameron of acting as a "cheerleader" for the US company in its $106 billion efforts to acquire the second-largest British pharma group, business secretary Vince Cable said the UK government was looking at options, including reviewing rules on intervening in takeovers on public interest grounds.

Cable is notoriously prone to public pressure, but a meeting today of British parliament's business, innovation and skills committee may add substance to his protectionist instincts as it discusses whether to summon Pfizer executives.

It brings to mind the antics of the then-Conservative opposition in early 2010, castigating the Labour government of the time from its little Englander stance, as Kraft Foods prepared to swallow Cadbury.

The whole episode is almost a mirror image of French hysteria over the $16.9 billion approach by General Electric for Alstom’s power business. And even then, after a brief bout of outrage and an attempt to draft in a neighbouring Germany’s Siemens as a tightly restricted white knight, President François Hollande’s government appears to have realised the diminishing extent of its power in global M&A, as Alstom chose to review GE’s bid in a move that makes the US giant favourite to succeed.

Perhaps the issue has been put into perspective best by Richard Sykes, a former chief executive of AstraZeneca's bigger UK rival GlaxoSmithKline. Writing in the Financial Times, he said that who owned AstraZeneca and where it was based were "irrelevant".

“What is really important is that Britain encourages these companies to do their drug discovery and development work here. To me that is the critical issue.”

Conceding defeat in the battle to determine Alstom's fate, Le Monde wrote last week: "This is the end of an era. The state no longer has the means to protect weak companies in sensitive sectors. The state can't do it all."

You’d imagine an open market government like Cameron’s shouldn’t need telling.