After a first-leg thrashing last week by MPs, a newly defiant private equity industry returned to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday and scraped a no-score draw. On aggregate, however, it still amounts to a PR defeat for an industry in dire need of articulate friends.

The argument on personal taxation has been lost. Ministers and voters will remember the admission from Nicholas Ferguson of SVG Capital that cleaners pay proportionately more tax than private equity partners long after more subtle points have been forgotten.

Even allowing for the showboating of some MPs, the industry looked shaky and evasive on corporate capital gains tax – unable or unwilling to provide any figures at all.

The debate on employment is totally muddied. Somehow the industry has failed to get across the message that it is probably a net creator of UK jobs.

The question of excessive leverage has been put to the wrong people. It is the banks and supervisors MPs need to grill, not the borrowers. Asking a buyout backer to turn away cheap, no-strings debt is like expecting a child to say no to another lollipop.

The tattiness and grubbiness of the nation’s £5 notes is a disgrace. The Bank of England has a vast pile of them ready to go and is grappling with ideas to get more into circulation. The problem is they don’t fit bank cash machines. A better idea, surely, would be to introduce a £5 coin. It would be a suitable swansong measure for a Chancellor under whose rule inflation hasn’t been entirely killed, after all.

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