Opinion: Make Amazon and the Internet giants pay costs of Covid

John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones4u, has come up with an even more provocative ploy to get Britain back on track: a huge windfall tax on online businesses that have ‘profiteered’ from the lockdown Internet shopping boom. — AFP

John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones4u, is talking to me from the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes people carrier as he travels back from skiing in Switzerland to Monaco.

It’s an unlikely place to hold a telephone interview in a pandemic – particularly for a vociferous Brexiteer who says he would much rather be in Britain, where he has a 15-bedroom mansion in Mayfair and a 50-room Jacobean mansion in Staffordshire.