SO, the owners of the Randolph Hotel finally break their silence about making their staff redundant.

Sad to say, we were not impressed by the statement, but at the stage, we were not surprised either.

The company has proven especially hard to get hold of since buying Oxford’s most iconic hotel, and nothing has changed in that regard.

Stuart Jarvis, the Randolph super-fan who tipped us off about the redundancies in the first place, described the statement yesterday as an insult to staff and, frankly, we agree.

The idea that the company did not expect this news to get into the public domain is not a credible one, so the only alternative is that it simply did not care how people in our city view it.

Read again: Randolph Hotel owners issue insulting statement on redundancies

We’ve no doubt that many of those who have lost their jobs will try to reapply for them when the company puts the adverts out again in six months’ time: many of these people have worked at the Randolph for years, are skilled at their jobs, and probably enjoy their work: they will naturally want to go back to the jobs that they know and, for the most part, love.

However it will be a bitter, bitter pill to swallow when, having desperately scrabbled to find some temporary work for six months or otherwise urgently find some way to make ends meet, they then have to submit their applications to do the jobs they were already doing – and compete against others for the privilege.

Some of those workers will not be hired to do the jobs they are doing perfectly well right now.

With all of this on their conscience, the Chicago-based managers of Graduate Hotels yesterday sent us a statement – a week after we had reported the news – of some four sentences.

We would never dream of tarring all of the people in the great United States with the same brush, but there is something distinctly Trumpian about this callous and capitalist statement about 75 hard-working people and the lives which are now in chaos.