The woke businessman, like the woke prince and princess, is an ambiguous figure. Being woke, after all, involves a contempt for profits and big business, as for social hierarchy. I first noticed this uneasy phenomenon many years ago when I attended a lunch in the City at which Paul Polman, the then chief executive of Unilever, read us a moralistic lecture about European integration, greenery and how ‘I agree with Mahatma Gandhi: you must be the change you want to see in the world’.