Jim Armitage: It's windfalls all round but a sly Fox may be awkward

As Donald Trump's trade wars make the US unpopular in the City, Comcast is helping mend Anglo-American relations.

The Philadelphia-based media giant’s spellbinding price for Sky brings windfalls for everybody from major investors such as Crispin Odey to the 13,000 Sky employees holding shares (note to Jeremy Corbyn: most decent companies already give stock to staff. No need to force them.)

The UK Treasury will trouser a fortune from Comcast’s largesse, too. Sky chief Jeremy Darroch and finance director Andrew Griffith — in line for £50 million and £27 million respectively for their shares — will pay more in UK tax than Amazon, Facebook and Netflix combined.

And that’s before you include tax on the fees for the advisers and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which will make millions lending Comcast the takeover money. BAML has also been busy today earning commission as broker to the deal, hoovering up the shares of Odey and other institutions on Comcast’s behalf.

But what will Fox do next? The loser in Saturday’s auction now finds itself in the position of holding 39% of a company over which it no longer has any management control.

It’s hard to see why it would hold on to the stake, although Fox’s effective owner Disney may hold on to it for a while to make trouble for Comcast.

What you might call the Awkward Squad approach.

It wouldn’t be the first time a telly company did this, as Darroch knows. In 2006 he bought nearly 20% of ITV solely to block a potential merger with NTL that would have been a threat to Sky.

It’s plausible that Disney could use its stake in Sky as a bargaining chip in negotiations to persuade Comcast to sell its stake in Hulu, the streaming service the pair jointly own with AT&T. Alternatively, it may just swallow its pride and view the multi-billion pound windfall as a highly profitable trade. After all, when Disney agreed to buy Fox, the deal valued the Sky stake at around £14 a share; a full £3.28 less than Saturday’s knockout bid. That’s a back-of-the-envelope profit for Disney of £2.2 billion.

Not a bad wooden spoon, is it?

Thomas Cook boss wishes he wasn't here

While Brits, Germans and Swedes were basking in the sun at home instead of heading to the Med, Thomas Cook was hurting badly. To fill beds, it had to cut prices hard.

Today’s was its second profit warning in two months and highlights just how risky it is to own shares in a company so reliant on earnings from one quarter of the year.

Next summer might be cooler in Northern Europe, but there will be niggles of concern that Cook has so little power to control its own pricing. Furthermore, it’s troubling that the new finance director is quitting months after his arrival.

Questions must be asked here both of chief executive Peter Fankhauser’s business model and judge of character.