Unilever, the maker of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, is eliciting City exclamations of, I Can’t Believe It’s Unilever. The usually leaden and bureaucratic consumer products company is producing a turn of sales speed associated with fleeter rivals such as Reckitt Benckiser and Procter & Gamble.

It may just be coincidence, but the pickup in sales, the widening of underlying margins, the decimating of the old middle-management tiers and the injection of fresh talent has exactly coincided with the 12-month period when companies of Unilever’s gargantuan size were for the first time seen as vulnerable to private equity bids. The threat of a leveraged takeover approach may have been just the stimulus the board needed to make tough decisions.

There will be sadness that Unilever is so clearly turning its back on its paternalistic past. In March it closed its final salary pension scheme to new workers. Yesterday it announced a cull of 20,000 jobs and 50 factories. One wonders what the founder Lord Leverhulme, who built Port Sunlight to enable his workers to escape the slums and spent half his fortune in a doomed philanthropic attempt to industrialise the Isle of Lewis, would have made of it all.

But chief executive Patrick Cescau’s harsh medicine may be the best way of ensuring the long-term health of the company. The question is, can he keep the momentum going? The curdling of confidence in the leveraged loan markets means the discipline created by the private equity threat has receded. Shareholders must hope that the golden glow now coming off the company has more permanence than that produced by its latest hot seller, Dove fake tan.

The latest moves in the campaign by Barclays to capture ABN Amro look smart. Signing up Chinese and Singapore institutions last week gave it cash firepower. The £2.4 billion buyback, beginning this Monday, announced yesterday, will help to buoy its share price – although the bank has to be careful that in its eagerness to boost the value of its shares-based offer, it doesn’t misuse these powers. The fact remains that the rival Royal Bank of Scotland consortium is in pole position. Barclays, if it fails, may itself become vulnerable to a bid. However, the same two moves could equally be useful in defence – giving Barclays a brace of large supportive shareholders and the means to rid itself of lukewarm ones.

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