The infrastructure company easily raised almost £7bn in a rights issue – because it has its balance sheet in order and plans to invest

So much for the idea that the woes of the water sector, and Thames Water in particular, would kill investors’ appetite for all British infrastructure assets. Here comes National Grid, which will probably be the UK’s biggest-spending infrastructure company over the next decade, with a mammoth fundraising that would not be possible if the stink from Thames had infected everything in the vicinity.

National Grid’s near-£7bn rights issue, to back a five-year, £60bn spending programme in the UK and US, is the biggest by a London-listed company since 2009. It is larger than expected and comes before the UK energy regulator, Ofgem, has nailed down the price control regime for the 2026-31 period. Throw in the supposed uncertainties created by Thames, plus a general election, and you might assume the safe option would have been to wait a while.

The retail giant has clocked up 12 consecutive quarters of sales growth but it must remember mistakes of the past

It is three years exactly since Archie Norman, the chair, said he’d spotted “green shoots” of recovery at Marks & Spencer, and, after a delay caused by the cost of living blight, a bloom has indeed appeared. Pre-tax profits rose 41% last year to £672m (or 58% to £716m ignoring “adjusting” items). Chief executive Stuart Machin, switching the metaphors from botanical to nautical, reckons there is “wind in our sails”.

The performance is definitely radically improved. The only real blemishes were in the international division, where the collection of overseas franchises and partnerships seems to have been an afterthought to the self-help programme at home, and at the joint venture with Ocado in food, which is producing the familiar sight of lively sales growth but bottom-line losses.

The former pharma laggard is in a race with Shell to be the first FTSE 100 stock to be valued at £200bn

The last time the AstraZeneca chief executive, Pascal Soriot, set long-term sales targets, he was greeted with a chorus of scepticism. It was 2014 and the company was fighting a takeover attempt by Pfizer of the US; Soriot seemed to be engaging in that age-old defence trick of throwing out a large number that he probably would not be around to deliver. A target to boost revenues by three-quarters over nine years looked wildly optimistic – a decade ago, the Anglo-Swedish firm was more laggard than leader in pharma-land.

In the event, of course, the milestone of $45bn was achieved ahead of time, which is why Tuesday’s latest long-term prediction of annual revenues of $80bn (£63bn) by 2030 will be treated as ultra-credible. Soriot is also still in post – and fit enough to do another five years, he said last year – so success or failure should be reasonably clear by the time he finally departs. As it is, growth was 19% in the last quarter, so a fast start is guaranteed.