Marmite maker Unilever is staying put in London. Here's what its shareholders should do in the wake of their victory

In opposing the company's Lexit plan, the City's institutions acted in their investors interests. This is their victory and nothing to do with any politicians, despite what they might have you believe

Unilever had planned to consolidate its headquarters at its base in Rotterdam (Reuters)

Politicians of varying stripes were quick to jump on marmite maker Unilever’s decision to abandon plans to pull its headquarters out of London, and its shares out of the FTSE 100, and no wonder. It’s created quite the froth.

But let’s be quite clear: This is not their victory, whatever their stripe.

It is not down to London mayor Sadiq Kahn and it has nothing to do with any efforts made by Theresa May’s Tory Government. As for the ramshackle army of gloating Brexiteers? They can belt up too.

This was, in point of fact, a battle fought and won through the prosaic virtue of responsible engagement and activism by big City institutions acting in the interests of the people who invest with them, which is not something that they always do.

Unilever moving its headquarters out of the UK and abandoning its dual headed Anglo-Dutch corporate structure would have seen it ejected from both the FTSE 100 and the FTSE All Share indices.

That would have forced funds run by the likes Legal & General, Standard Life, Aviva and others, to sell up (full disclosure, I have funds that track FTSE indices and Unilever’s presence within them thus benefits me) because of the rules they operate under.

As a result, there would have been an awful lot of stock hitting the market in a short timespan, which would have depressed the selling price. But Unilever’s London exit - a Lexit? - would also have deprived their funds of a high quality, well run, company; a reliable performer with a reliable dividend that is the sort of hardy perennial every investor needs.

It was thus very much in the interests of the clients of London institutions for them to say no, and for them to do so publicly, as a number of big fund managers did (but not, sadly, BlackRock, a heavy hitting index tracker manager).

This left Unilever, which needed to secure the support of 75 per cent of its UK shareholders, facing a potentially embarrassing defeat.

In the City you don’t hold a vote you can’t win if you can help it, so it sensibly withdrew.

Not happily, mind. The statement it issued explaining the decision had the feeling of a Scooby Doo style “we’d have got away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids”.

I imagine there will be some strained conversations between a board that robustly defended the plan - “guided by the opportunity to unlock value for our shareholders by creating a stronger, simpler and more competitive Unilever” - and investors over the coming months.

Shareholder value was clearly not the sole issue in bringing this forward, however.

Forget Brexit. Going Dutch would have made it much harder for the likes of Kraft Foods to come forward with opportunistic, and bad, bids in future because of the regulations in that country. Remember, Unilever only narrowly avoided getting taken out by Kraft last year.

While a successful bid would have got UK institutions out at a premium, rather than the discount they’d have had to accept through a sale forced upon them by an exit from the FTSE, their investors would have lost a quality outfit from their portfolios in either scenario.

One way to sooth any wounded feelings at Unilever might be for the shareholders that opposed its Lexit to make clear that they’re in it for the long haul and will stand full square behind the board if the Americans come a calling in the future.

To be fair, some of them did that last time around.