On to 12,000? Well, the FTSE 100 index hit another all-time high and managed to get within 11 points of 11,000 on Friday morning before falling back to close down a whisker at 10,868. 

Basically we’re back to where we were at the Footsie’s peak at the end of February before the attack on Iran soured the mood.

The Middle East war continues with no clear end in sight, yet the Footsie is up more than 9 per cent on the year and the S&P500, the most representative US index, is up more than 8 per cent. 

All this makes you wonder what on earth will happen to equities as and when the Strait of Hormuz is reopened and the region calms down.

There is a decent explanation as to why equities in general remain so strong, and in particular why London remains good value. 

One reason is that there is still a lot of money swishing around the world and hunting for a home. 

So it makes sense to look for value and the shares of big UK-based enterprises offer that. But the past few days have shown something else. It’s not simply that the UK market is relatively cheap. Several of the most valuable members of the Footsie are doing really well.

We have just had cracking results from Shell, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, and this week the market expects strong figures from HSBC and BP. 

HSBC is currently worth around £270billion, giving it the highest market capitalisation on the index, with its shares up more than 30 per cent this year. 

As for BP, it has been given a boost both from the Shell performance and from this latest news about putting its North Sea operations up for sale. 

I see this more as a tidying up operation – a sign that its excellent new chief executive Meg O’Neill is focusing on the company’s future winners – rather than a deliberate boot in the face of this government and its predecessors for their tax and regulatory policies. 

But it should serve as a warning to all governments that you need to be thoughtful about the long-term consequences of your actions, rather than trotting out crowd-pleasing ideas dreamt up in Whitehall.

What should we look out for next?

A huge amount depends on the mood of US investors. That is where the money is, and the big driver of this latest rise in UK share prices has been decisions there to slip a bit of the huge profits they have made towards UK-based multinationals. 

You could say it’s crumbs off the rich man’s table and in a way it is, but the numbers in New York are so massive that diverting even a small proportion of those funds towards London has an outsized impact here. 

Apple, currently worth just under $5trillion, has a higher valuation than all the companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange together, the whole lot. 

HSBC may seem a giant in our terms and indeed it is. But on my quick tally there are around 40 US corporations that are worth as much or more.

This raises a fascinating question. Will Andy Burnham improve or undermine the view that US investors take of Britain? Big money remains pretty negative about the UK at the moment. You can see that in the gilt market. 

The 10-year yield climbed back above 5 per cent yesterday, which was probably a reaction to the equivalent yield on US treasuries rising to 4.75 per cent. 

But we ought not to be paying a premium at all, and aside from a few days when Liz Truss was PM we weren’t until Labour took office two years ago. 

Insofar as US investors think about Andy Burnham at all I suspect that they simply see him as another stop-gap who will be out on his ear pretty soon.

Foreigners, mostly Americans, already own around two-thirds of all the UK market. 

So they lob a bit more money not because of our domestic politics, but because there are some great companies and it’s a cheap way of buying into the global economy.

Three-quarters of the earnings of the Footsie members are derived outside Britain. And of course they don’t live here and are not paying our taxes so they don’t care whether Burnham brings in a death tax or whatever.

The bottom line is that we don’t need to become fashionable to attract more money into London. All we need to do is become a little less unfashionable – and I give that an even chance of happening.