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Crowd pleaser: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Photo: REUTERS

Newt Gingrich’s attack on Mitt Romney was not merely a longing for revenge.

In the midst of what was shaping up to be a stupefyingly boring US presidential primary last week, an interesting thing happened. This bizarrely unexpected turn of events might have been explained by the desperation of one of the candidates, Newt Gingrich, to make a perceptible dent on the drearily predictable front runner, Mitt Romney, or possibly as an attempt by virtually everybody involved to inject something startling into a monumentally tedious political process. Whatever it was that provoked it, the phenomenon should be of serious interest both in the United States and in Britain, where it has been a feature of our public life for much longer.

What happened was this: a number of Republican candidates who are generally thought to be on the Right of Mr Romney began to attack him from the Left. Homing in on Romney’s career in the venture capital business – a feature of his past which is generally thought to count as an advantage in a contest with the unworldly academic Barack Obama – Gingrich launched into a full-blown assault on the evils of asset-stripping corporate take-over merchants who mercilessly disregard the fate of ordinary workers. Sounding for all the world like a good old-fashioned European socialist (which is to say, like Ed Miliband), he railed against Romney’s former company Bain Capital, which specialised in buy-outs of failing businesses, describing his rival as a "corporate looter".

The even more desperate (and even more Right-wing) contender, Rick Perry, dragged Wall Street into the mix, and spoke of something called "vulture capitalism" – a rather more lurid image than Mr Miliband’s "predator capitalism", although it is, in fact, less alarming since vultures only prey on the already dead.

What on earth were they thinking? Why should this band of Republicans who, in almost any other context, would lay down their lives for the principles of free-market economics, have taken up the language of the Occupy movement? The activities for which they were unloading such opprobrium on Mr Romney were precisely ones which they themselves would almost certainly defend, at least in general terms, were they under attack from Liberal Democrats.

The process of taking over inefficient or uncompetitive enterprises and re-structuring them – even if that involves cutting back on staff – so that they can become net contributors to economic growth is a pretty standard feature of a dynamic enterprise economy. It is always possible to find instances of it which seem callous or involve unfortunate consequences for local employees but the final result – a more productive, competently run business sector – should benefit the whole community in the end.

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