To be fair to Mr Conn, this extraordinary statement was a reaction to what students of politics might see as a philosophically un-Conservative decision by the government to propose a cap on energy prices. It was, in fact, a policy championed by former Labour leader 'Red' Ed Miliband during the last election in 2015, and Mr Conn presumably felt the threat had evaporated along with Labour's current electoral chances.
However, unusual policy moves are perhaps to be expected in the midst of unusual general elections, and Theresa May had already indicated that she would intervene where it was believed that markets were dysfunctional. The domestic energy market certainly fits that bill. As a former customer of Centrica - through British Gas - I know that only too well. Mysteriously rising direct debits, billing errors, delays returning overpayments, an ultimately fruitless wait for a smart meter and, of course, uncompetitive prices point to a company failing its customers on many levels. I switched of course, but it is only in recent months - and through the lengthy application of regulatory pressure - that this process has been streamlined.
I'm sorry, Mr Conn, but you can't have free markets both ways - because free markets do not mean the freedom to treat customers badly. Centrica's plunging share price - which as a shareholder I am equally unimpressed with - reflects a corporate failure that extends beyond policy headwinds. And the critical nature of power generation means it has never been an industry free from government interference, anyway.
There is an irony in all of this in that Labour under Corbyn has continued its crusade against the worst excesses of big business and what it calls wealth extractors, epitomised, it says, by former BHS owner Philip Green. Green, as you may remember, was recruited by the Cameron government to conduct an efficiency review. Quite what he was expected to discover of such a large and complex area as state procurement in only six weeks I do not know, but I am sure he quickly realised that such diseconomies of scale are not easily remedied.
This is an inherent problem, I believe, in very large companies - RBS, for example, was often said to be too big to fail, but it was also arguably too big to run. And that's why I often find strange how widely disparaged the Aim market is. Sure it is loosely regulated, and at the smaller end can be a bit of a Wild West. But its larger companies - which we analyse this week - are hardly minnows, yet also not big enough to quell their entrepreneurial ethos or be limited by the overwhelming bureaucracy or operational overreach that can cripple their larger counterparts.
That it exists at all is in fact a sign that the free market in financial services championed in the UK has worked.
