Political risks are getting too hot for private companies Yes the market has deemed it right to mark the company's shares down from a pre-Olympics high of 290p to 258p now, but Buckles has kept his job (a couple of junior managers didn't) and recent results have been well received. All this should remind the private sector of just how fine the line is in politics between Government supporting and being an allay of your business and attacking it for purely pragmatic political reasons. G4S must now realise that the Government's withdrawal of support for its prison services risks reverberating internationally with other governments. This is seriously painful for Buckles and his business. Serco, Sodexo, Amey, Capital and the like must all be saying today, "There but for the grace of God go I." But the G4S decision highlights wider risks that companies run when doing business with politicians of any hue. There are those who will argue that episodes such as the Olympics security contract prove that the private sector cannot be trusted with the task of delivering public services. Likewise the train operating companies have proved unable to run regional franchises. How much money have energy utilities made out of gas and electricity customers post privatisation? It's not hard to see how the arguments could develop in pushing back the progress of the past 30 years in getting more productivity, more investment and better results out of tax-payer funded services by having them delivered in the disciplined and focused way the private sector on the whole brings. It's true private sector provision of public services needs re-thinking but that's largely in the way the civil service runs the bidding process for these contracts - highlighted most obviously by the Department for Transport and its utter Horlicks over the West Coast Mainline, a cock-up every bit as serious and damaging as the G4S failures at the Olympics That particular farrago is notable because it's so unusual. The private sector is far from perfect but its mistakes are rarely on such a large and serious scale. Crucially companies learn from their mistakes, and embed those lessons in their organisations in a way the civil service is incapable of. Thankfully the Home Office is pressing ahead with awarding contracts to other private companies to operate prisons. But it, and the rest of Whitehall, must be wary of scaring off private enterprise from partnering with Government in the future if the sort of political risks revealed by the G4S case become the norm. If the private sector felt the political risks were too great to make the provision of public services worthwhile then that would punish all of us as the fight against the colossal waste and inefficiency of the public sector would be lost.