Bondholders are hoping to escape intact if Ofwat is sufficiently generous with its increases in bills

What is the new government’s policy on Thames Water? We’ll get a firmer guide – maybe – after regulator Ofwat gives its verdict on all the English and Welsh water companies’ business plans on Thursday. In the meantime, all we have to go on is this pre-election comment from Jonathan Reynolds, now the business secretary: “I wouldn’t want to see a nationalisation. I think there should be a solution that falls short of that.”

That statement raises more questions than it answers, unfortunately. Which type of nationalisation would Labour not wish to see? A full-fat, permanent return to public ownership? Or also the temporary “special administration” variety in which Thames’s balance sheet would be straightened out before a return to the private sector?

Familiar concerns over bosses’ pay, prices and borrowing emerged in the utilities’ early years in private hands, with UK dubbed the ‘dirty man of Europe’

There was a time when privatised British water companies were as unpopular as they are now. During the hot summer of 1995, the managing director of Yorkshire Water, Trevor Newton, achieved notoriety when he urged customers to use less of his company’s product by issuing a motivational message: “I personally have not had a bath or shower for three months.”

After a round of jokes about “the filthy rich” – because megabucks pay for water company bosses was also in the headlines in those days – Newton invited the press to watch him washing with a flannel and bowl. It later emerged he had been popping out of Yorkshire for a soak at his parents’ and in-laws’ homes.