I’ve seen the future in India, and Britain can share the spoils

Boris Johnson

Pssht, I said to Barry from the High Commission. Look, there, I pointed. There it was, slap bang in the middle of the road. It was a giant cat – as black as Bagheera from The Jungle Book, and if anything a bit bigger. We’d only been in India for about half an hour, and we’d already seen kites circling in the blood-red sun of dawn. We’d seen dewlapped cows grazing on patches of grass by the expressways, and elephants waiting for their mahouts to finish their ablutions in the fields. But this was something else.

We drew nearer. Still it didn’t move. “Are you sure it is?” I asked Barry. He leaned over and put the question to the driver. “Is that a Jaguar?” “Yes, sir, it is a Jaguar.”

My friends, it was indeed. Within a few miles of Indira Gandhi Airport, we had found a genuine British Jaguar, waiting at the traffic lights. It was designed at Whitley near Coventry and at Gaydon near Warwick, and assembled into the mighty black beast before us by the workforce of Castle Bromwich near Birmingham. Here, in one of the biggest and fastest-growing markets in the world, I am proud to say that we had found evidence of market penetration by one of this country’s proudest motoring marques.

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India should be one of this country’s key partners for all sorts of geostrategic reasons, and David Cameron was dead right to make this his first port of call in 2010. But it is the economic partnerships that offer the most extraordinary prospects.

Imagine selling a Jag to one in every 100,000 Indians. That’s a lot of Jags, and a lot of jobs.

Read more: www.telegraph.co.uk