“It’s our job to help them make the right decisions” was how Adam Love, itachi Rail’s head of external communications, described his firm’s relationship with government when I first looked into the often shadowy, always deliberate world of lobbying and public affairs in Westminster six years ago. The world has changed in innumerable ways since we sat down at a swanky conference in central London attended by key figures in his industry and representatives from City Hall and TfL. But lobbyists’ fundamental worldview – that it is their job merely to guide policymakers towards enlightened decisions – hasn’t changed. The invisible hand lives on. For Gareth Stace, director general of the trade body UK Steel, that work has been urgent. Representing the UK’s steel producers – and the roughly forty thousand workers directly employed in it – Stace had as chaotic a spring as anyone. Eight weeks before President Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” and less than a month after he took office, the UK ...