The tribulations of MG Rover and the Longbridge production facility have not so much turned into farce as into a comic opera. The plot seems to be following Gilbert and Sullivan's rambling and disjointed Utopia Limited, in which a faraway country unwisely decides to adopt British working practices and institutions, a situation that leads to disaster after every citizen is declared a limited company (complete with prospectus). For that foreign land read China, which has two bidders tussling over the corpse of MG Rover. For British practices, note that the government here is taking a hands-off role - in contrast to the various US legislators who are hooting and hollering over the takeover bid for a US oil company by a Chinese one.

The saga began after BMW offloaded Rover to a consortium long on promises but short on actually selling cars. When it collapsed earlier this year, with the loss of 5,000 jobs, predators gathered to pick over the bones. The key recent events are that Honda - a one-time partner of Rover - pounced to seize back equipment and technology that it claimed rightly belonged to itself. Meanwhile, two state-owned Chinese carmakers, Nanjing Automobile and rival bidder Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, conducted a weird auction for the remaining assets. Last week Nanjing Automobile appeared to have won - paying MG Rover's administrators between £50m and £100m, depending on who you ask. SAIC is threatening legal action, having made a separate deal with the former owners of Rover to buy various intellectual property rights to car and engine designs. That, SAIC claims, would stymie Nanjing's plans.

At stake is the possibility that Nanjing could restart production in the UK, producing MG sports-car models, saving an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 jobs in the process. But it is worth being sceptical about whether any jobs will ever result from this deal, certainly in the optimistic numbers being bandied around. First, there is the legal issue raised by SAIC. Second, there is the fact that Nanjing plans to ship portions of the Rover plant to China for mass production there, and could easily ship the MG production lines as well. Hopefully not, but breath-holding would not be advised. A "white knight" may yet come forward with a better bid for the MG sports-car production line, in which case a little government intervention would not go amiss. In any case the comic opera carries on - as George Bernard Shaw said in reviewing Utopia Limited's opening night: "There is, happily, no plot."