A minister is meeting with the Jaguar Land Rover boss this week to discuss the thousands of jobs about to vanish into the corporate void. The occasion demands the kind of gravitas usually reserved for peace summits or royal weddings. Expect a photo opportunity, some carefully worded statements about “difficult decisions,” and absolutely no acknowledgment that this entire situation is a self-inflicted wound wrapped in a tariff and tied up with a cyber attack bow.
The company is drowning in two self-created problems. First, there are the tariffs—trade barriers that arrived like an unwanted guest and are now eating the entire buffet. Second, last year’s cyber attack decided to crash the party too, leaving systems scrambled and operations limping along like a guest who lost a shoe on the dance floor.
But here is what makes this genuinely absurd: a government minister flying in to meet a corporate executive about mass layoffs is not crisis management. It is theater. The minister cannot reverse tariffs with a handshake. The executive cannot unhack their systems with a press release. What they can do is sit across a table, nod solemnly, and create the impression that someone is in control while thousands of people start updating their CVs.
The real story is not the meeting. It is that a major manufacturer got caught flat-footed by predictable trade policy and failed to secure basic cybersecurity. Now the bill is being paid by workers who had nothing to do with either decision. The government shows up to manage the optics. Everyone goes home feeling like they tried. The jobs stay gone.