Experts such as Bloomberg and Aston University’s David Bailey predict a tipping point in the 2020s in some parts of the world, when Electric cars simply make more financial sense for drivers than those powered by a combustion engine.

And while the oil companies are right that increasingly affluent Chinese and Indians will want cars, they seem to ignore the fact that electric ones offer a fix for those countries’ air pollution problems, which their citizens are pushing further up the political agenda.

One direct answer is that Standard Life, one of the leading rebels of a year ago, has sold its shares while Schroders returned to the register and voted its 5% stake in favour of Hellawell.

The result, though, is an embarrassment for the Investor Forum, the lobbying group of big shareholders that secured the pledge from Sports Direct to hold a governance review and then saw it broken.

Union membership has more than halved from its peak of 13 million in the mid-70s, yet the installation of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader will give them renewed heft should the left win the next election.