Boom! Bang! We’re a week away from the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and the big guns are beginning to fire again in quick succession. In the space of just two days, we have a huge deal announced in the food sector (Kraft trying and failing to buy Cadbury’s for £10bn) and then the telecoms sector (Orange and T-Mobile planning a merger that would create an £8bn-revenue mobile phone giant). Recession? What recession?We should pause for a moment. For starters, these deals didn’t emanate from the UK: Kraft launched their Cadbury’s bid from Illinois, while the Orange/T-Mobile tie-up was negotiated by respective owners France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom.

There was also a familiar flavour running throughout. Advising Kraft, we have Clifford Chance; for Cadbury’s, we reportedly have Slaughter and May. Advising Deutsche Telekom, we have Clifford Chance; for France Telecom, we have Norton Rose. In other words, two firms with big international offices (Clifford Chance and Norton Rose) and one deal-making specialist from the company’s resident country (Slaughter and May) picked up the work.

There are a few points to make on all of this.

One – big deals are great deals to be doing, and even better in a recession. Grab hold of one, and not only do you reap immediate financial rewards, but you also doom your competitors to a lengthy wait for the next blockbuster.

Two – the driving forces behind these deals came from outside the UK. It illustrates the fact that this country’s recession is taking longer to shake than in the US, France and Germany – which in turn makes life tougher for the UK’s mid-tier M&A specialists, relying as they do on deals being done within these borders. We probably need to see a couple of intra-UK deals on the Cadbury’s scale before confidence returns to the national M&A market.

Three – two of the UK’s international firms picked up the work stemming from the non-UK companies. Could that provoke a pang of jealousy from those that declined to expand during the boom times?