The National Audit Office does not use excitable phrases like “utter shambles.” But the spending watchdog’s verdict on Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power plant in Somerset that is supposedly inevitable, amounts to the same thing. The government “has locked consumers into a risky and expensive project with uncertain strategic and economic benefits”.

The 80-page report confirms one’s worst fears about how ministers fell in love with Hinkley. First, they wedded themselves to an inflexible financial model. Then they agreed commercial terms with developer EDF in 2013, when energy prices were sky-high, and ploughed on regardless when the economic case for Hinkley started to crumble.

The first error is the easier to understand. Ministers followed a standard model in which the developer bears the construction risks in return for a state guarantee on the price of the electricity eventually produced. But Hinkley, scheduled to provide 7% of the nation’s electricity, was never a normal project. It is bigger than anything ever seen before and the price guarantee – to be funded via consumers’ bills – extends over 35 years.

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Could the government have saved money for consumers in the long run by shouldering some of the upfront costs? The NAO suggests so: “Alternative approaches could have reduced the total project cost,” it says. The scandalous part is that sums were never done. Thus we are locked into paying £92.50 per megawatt hour, index-linked to 2012 prices, when the market price is half that level.

The second failing is worse. When the deal was finally signed by Theresa May’s administration last September, the energy landscape had been transformed. The economic case for Hinkley was “marginal”, says the NAO, and “less favourable, but reasonable, assumptions” about energy prices and renewables would have meant the deal was not value for money even on the business department’s own model.

The document tells a depressing tale of inadequate scrutiny and successive governments ignoring the energy revolution taking place beyond their spreadsheets. “Time will tell whether the deal represents value for money,” says the NAO generously, before adding the killer clause: “But we cannot say the department has maximised the chances that it will be.” The rest of us call that a politician’s vanity project.

Application of Imagination

Soon we will discover if Apple really is engaged in a cunning plan to undermine the stock market value of Imagination Technologies and then buy the UK designer of graphics processors on the cheap.

Imagination has put itself up for sale, a decision that has looked inevitable for weeks. Life changed overnight for the Hertfordshire firm when Apple said in April that, in 15 months, it would no longer require Imagination’s clever kit, which is used in smartphones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches.

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Apple represents about half of Imagination’s revenues, which is why the share price crashed 60%. The two companies were immediately at legal loggerheads. Imagination wants evidence that its patents won’t be infringed if Apple tries to design its own graphics architecture. The dispute continues unhappily.

But waging a long legal war with a giant like Apple would be an impossibly expensive strategy for Imagination, worth £400m. Finding a buyer is the more sober course, especially as it has received approaches from “a number of parties”.

Is Apple one? You can’t blame conspiracy theorists for wondering. Apple owns 8% of Imagination and contemplated a bid last year. But one can say this: a bid from Apple in these circumstances would stink. An early statement from California that the speculation is wrong, and that it is not in the running, would be welcome.

Passing the executive pay package buck

Dennis Millard, the chairman of Halfords, says it is “disappointing” that chief executive Jill McDonald resigned last month to try her hand at selling clothes at Marks & Spencer. Disappointed, in this context, means seriously annoyed. It shows. McDonald has been awarded zero bonus and her long-term incentive and retention awards cancelled. That’s entirely fair: she’s leaving a job half-done at Halfords by quitting 18 months into a three-year plan.

But the episode also demonstrates the nonsense of companies’ claims that they need to pay all-singing, all-dancing remuneration packages to “recruit and retain” top executives. The retention bit is meaningless because the new employer just picks up the tab.

In McDonald’s case, the bill for M&S could run to £1.6m and may even include sums that Halfords agreed to pay to buy her out of her previous job at McDonald’s. M&S, no doubt, will then add its own incentives on top and whistle the same empty tune about the need to pay for loyalty.