Peter Mandelson, Britain’s business secretary, is contemplating a bail-out of Jaguar Land Rover. It is hard to imagine a less deserving candidate. The luxury carmaker fails the public interest test on two key grounds. First, its products are of questionable social utility. For the government to allocate scarce funds to prop up the production of the 4.2 Litre V8 Petrol Supercharged Jaguar is a nonsense. It has a top speed of more than 150mph, emits 299g of carbon dioxide per kilometre and costs about three times the average annual wage. True, the UK car industry employs 190,000 people directly and supports several hundred thousand more once components and retailing are taken into account. But if Lord Mandelson wants the government to underwrite this £50bn industry, he should harness such public funds as are available to develop the green cars of the future, not pander to vested interests.

The second reason Lord Mandelson should refuse to bail out JLR is that Tata Motors, the Indian company that paid $2.3bn for it, is capable of doing so itself, if it wishes. Tata Motors, let it not be forgotten, is a subsidiary of Tata Group, one of the wealthiest companies on the subcontinent, with revenues of $62.5bn and profits of $5.4bn last year. The argument that thousands of jobs are at stake is weak: sectors employing many more, such as retail, receive no special treatment. If job protection starts to drive government policy, then the UK would bar Tata Consulting Services, a sister company, from offering the type of business process outsourcing services that have sucked back-office jobs to India in their hundreds of thousands during the past decade. But that would be nutty. Manufacturers are now leaner precisely because they now manage their inventory, process warranty claims and order spare parts through TCS’s offshore centres. The simple truth is that Tata Motors overpaid for a trophy asset with poor prospects. It must sort it out itself.