You might be forgiven for thinking all of this. But you would also be exposed to well-founded accusations of unfairness. It is true that Mr Morrow’s last job was to head up Vodafone’s ill-starred Japanese business. But if there were mistakes made by Vodafone in Japan, they were not made by Mr Morrow. He has only been in Tokyo for 18 months, a period when the operation began to look like it was able to stand up for itself. And being able to stand up for itself equates to a good performance and reflects well on Mr Morrow. Unlike the UK and European arms businesses, Vodafone Japan was not a market leader. Some might be so unkind as to suggest it held an also-ran position.

It could be argued that Vodafone made a mistake because it committed too much time, effort and capital to its Japanese ambitions. It is, however, only an easy arguement to make with the benefit of hindsight. Yet whatever side of the debate you take, Mr Morrow has flown west with an unstained reputation. He is admired for grasping the nature of operational challenges quickly. He has an ability to develop appropriate and suitable strategies. Perhaps most encouragingly, however, he is known as someone who is able to put wise words into action.

It is exactly what Vodafone needs at the moment. Plans outlined yesterday by Vodafone to embrace the emerging theme of convergence in media, telecoms and information technology are similarly practical.

The company is looking way beyond pure mobile telecoms. The potential threat from new technologies like voice-overinternet are as yet unclear. But they are challenges Vodafone can ill afford to ignore.

Vodafone may march into the future with the help of acquisitions. Armed with the proceeds of the sale of the Japanese unit, it could spend eye-popping amounts transforming itself into a fully converged media and telecoms outfit.

Shareholders would be most concerned if the cash was diverted away from their pockets, however. Vodafone has promised to return it to them, and this it will do. Vodafone’s preferred, and much more sensible, route forward is to enter partnership arrangements.

There are dangers, however. The first is that these partnership arrangements will be mired in the kind of management treacle that surrounded joint ventures. Joint ventures used to be all the rage. Nowadays the expression is barely ever used.

There is also danger that “convergence” is no more than a fancy badge for the bundling of services. And the difference between “convergence” and “bundling” is crucial because the former suggests there is value to be added, and profit to be made, from bringing content and delivering mechanisms together. If we are talking about bundling, however, we can assume that there is no extra money in the trend. Indeed, if the future is about bundles, the margins of profitability may get squeezed.

Be excited about boring Bank

MERVYN KING, Governor of the Bank of England, says he wants monetary policy to be boring. He and his colleagues on the Monetary Policy Committee are doing their best. For the eighth month in a row they have left the Bank’s discount rate unchanged at 4.5 per cent and no one was in the least bit surprised.

This yawn-making ambition, far from being negative, is making a positive contribution to consumer confidence. Homebuyers cannot be sure that rates will not rise some time this year, although that looks unlikely at present. They do know that mortgage costs are most unlikely to change drastically: most likely just a quarter point one way or the other.

People can make financial decisions in fair anticipation that no sudden, unforeseeable change will make nonsense of those decisions. For business, that makes expanding and investing less risky. Demand for services, for instance, is not going to fall off a cliff.

Business is reluctant to make financial commitments, put off by unexciting rates of return and below-trend economic growth. So it is again up to consumers to make the running. Rising house prices and homeowners taking out more of their equity have dissuaded all but one MPC member from voting for another rate cut.

This arithmetic assuredly did not alter much in yesterday’s vote. A rate cut is still the only change on the MPC agenda but unless consumers get coy, the MPC is unlikely to cut rates before late summer except in response to some external shock, such as bird flu or a hedge fund failure. And that is comforting, too.

Lloyd's rallies

LLOYD’S has recovered its strength. The London insurer absorbed £3.3 billion in claims from Hurricane Katrina et al in a record year of catastrophes and still contained net losses to £103 million. A few years ago, such episodes threatened the existence of the market. Now Lloyd’s is right back in business. In America, where it suffered dreadful publicity during the bad years, it may again be better known as the insurer that paid up on the San Francisco earthquake 100 years ago.

But Richard Ward, the new chief executive, should be under no illusion that Lloyd’s can sit back on its laurels. It has made a full comeback but is now only one player among many. Outsiders chasing post-Katrina premium levels are just as likely as their predecessors to exaggerate insurance cycles and Lloyd’s still has a way to go in cost cutting and technology. If the market works hard, however, it will be here to stay.

Cash return

A USEFUL new wave of inward investment could soon hit Britain. If the latest assault on the UK’s corporation tax system at the European Court of Justice succeeds — as an advocate-general’s opinion suggests that it should — then multinationals will be free to bring billions more of their continental profits back to the UK without paying tax. That is good news. With big chunks of extra cash back in Britain, there should be that much more cash around to fill in all those black holes in all those pension funds.

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