India, April 16 -- Picking industrial winners and shaping company strategy used to be a favorite political pastime in the UK. It had its zenith in the early 1970s, when a Labour government's catastrophic intervention sent British Leyland, an automotive company, permanently off the road. Yet the policy seems to be making a return under a Conservative Party that would previously have been horrified by such antics. The erstwhile stewards of the free market are taking an unhealthy interest in company affairs. And much of their attention is on telecom.

It started last year, when the UK became one of a small number of Western countries to curtail the activities of Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese vendors of network equipment. That would have seemed...