Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, last month bemoaned the gulf between City bonuses and the more humble salaries earned by employees of small and medium-sized UK companies. Few deals capture the gulf between the City and the rest of the economy quite as neatly as the latest agreed bid for Enodis, the engineering group.

The deal is an example of how the investment community seems to have given up on Britain's engineering sector. Many UK engineers have sizeable operations in the US, which fund managers assume is a bad thing. The sector's constituents are also relatively small and have attracted less coverage by analysts. The result is depressed valuations that make British industry a fertile hunting ground for foreign predators.