An increasingly prominent part of the business news agenda has been the lack of reporting by private equity companies. Having quietly gone about their business of acquiring sluggish industrial companies, they were surprised by the hostile reaction of the public when they started moving in on household name companies.

”When they were buying and restructuring reasonably large businesses in relatively unattractive parts of industry, although it was important locally, there was no national media profile,” says John Cole, a partner at Ernst & Young. ”If you buy Boots or Sainsburys, the national press sees it as a story.”