Greene King’s £750m bid for Spirit is exactly as advertised a fortnight ago. The share ratio is the same and the cash element remains tiny – just 8p in an offer that values Spirit at 112p at current prices. Clearly, the Greene King chief executive, Rooney Anand, felt no pressure to add a few pennies to ward off would-be gatecrashers.

There are probably two good reasons for that. First, C&C Group, the Irish cider firm that is formally still loitering, gave its shareholders a virtual heart attack when it expressed an interest in bidding. Its share price fell 11% in a day. It is hard to come back from that. Most C&C investors clearly do not wish to get into a bidding war with a big pub operator like Greene King.

The second reason is that Anand is not getting Spirit on the cheap. Greene King is paying a 50% takeover premium for a business that looks like a mini version of its retail estate. That is not an obvious bargain. The geographic fit looks reasonable but a third of Spirit’s 1,200-strong estate are tenancies and leaseholds; Greene King has been a consistent seller of those in recent years.

The potential for cost savings – £30m a year, says Greene King – apparently justifies paying 10 times Spirit’s top-line pre-interest profits. Possibly. This still looks a deal motivated mostly by the basic desire to be bigger.