Firstly, the crisis surrounding Northern Rock seemed to be getting worse and worse. It now seems obvious that the whole fiasco is going to end up costing Johnny Taxpayer a vast mound of cash. Any talk of the entire bulk of the emergency lending being repaid has virtually disappeared. The further anyone looks into Rock’s books the uglier it gets with new talk of mortgages already in hock in the Channel Islands. The government is now quite desperate to get the problem removed but the vultures circling the stricken bank will want their pickings cheap. They know they have the controlling hand (or talon) and it won’t be going any deeper into their feathery pockets than absolutely necessary. And that includes Virgin.

Secondly, those child benefit CDs. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… In the last 48 hours I’ve received a inbox full of blood-curdling emails from Net Security outfits predicting all sorts of dire consequences as a result of the worst government lost-in-the-post saga since Margaret Thatcher’s P45 went AWOL. I don’t wish to sound like an apologist for an inexcusable cock-up and breach of procedure by those feckless amateurs up in Washington, Tyne and Wear... But isn’t the most likely outcome that those discs have slipped down the back of some DSS restroom sofa or other, rather than wound up in the hands of ruthless Romanian identity-stealing mafia gangs or worse still, as has been suggested, a band of predatory paedophiles. I bet a huge proportion of the population every day chucks letters containing exactly the same data as was on the discs into their rubbish or recycling bags without giving it a second thought.

Thirdly, the football. God, this left me so depressed I almost booted the cat. Next June/July will be gruesome as we are left with nothing more than our cricketing boys taking a hiding from the South Africans to keep us amused. It’s too simple to lay this disaster at the door of that dolt McClaren (I hear David Beckham says McClaren was the only manager he never felt scared of). Those grim, grey-suited fat heads who run the game are a woeful crew. I’m with The Sun in advocating we get rid of the lot of them. Here’s my line-up for a new FA board: Chair: Jose Mourinho, assisted by Simon Cowell, Sir Terry Leahy, HRH Prince Edward, Gerald Ratner and that nice Sarah Beeny from “Property Ladder.” With that line-up how can we lose?  (Unless we put Carson in goal, perhaps.)

For my sins, the massaging of my ego and the odd tiny appearance fee, I do a fair bit of commentating on TV and radio about business topics. It brings out the suppressed Thespian in me. This year by far the largest demand for MG’s comment has come over the subject of “excessive” remuneration for fat cats and the widening gap between those who toil in the ranks of companies and those who lead them. In recent months I’ve been into the lion’s den with Polly Toynbee - who advocated we all live like the Finns -  and had a couple of on-air scraps with members of the TUC.

My line is normally a combination of the following: a robust rejection of the politics of envy, a plee that success should be rewarded and celebrated when justified, and  the pitifully short tenure expectancy of a FTSE 250 CEO. Then, if I’m feeling more playful, I ask rhetorically if a return to an income tax top rate of 98% plus an incomes policy where everyone’s take-home was worked out with the unions over beer and sandwiches at Number 10 would be such a good idea. A sort of you-can’t buck-the-market approach.

There are, however, limits to my tolerance of the behaviour of the titans and the Masters of the Universe who swan about in the world of finance. These people have been out making some huge stacks of hay as the sun has shone over the last decade and I fear they may have buggered things up for all of us. The whole thing is now unravelling and with their dodgy sub-prime offers bound up into collateralised debt obligations they have made a right royal screw up for large swathes of the good folk of middle America not to mention the broader US economy.

So when I hear, as the chickens come home to roost, that the ousted bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup are likely to walk off with $161.5 million and $95 million respectively I get more than a bit cross. Matt Ridley, the Chairman who presided over the cock-up at Northern Rock has done the honorable thing and gone without payment. So should they - if these fantastically rich individuals live by the sword then they must die by it. 

I feel terribly sorry for its 1,100 unfortunate store staff who had been working without pay for the last six weeks and have now lost their jobs. These are people who were being paid not much above the minimum wage in the first place and the failure of the business is not their fault but that of the management.

The grim truth is that Kwik Save was a dog of a business which makes the cheap 'n faux-chic Aldi and Lidl look like the food hall at Selfridges. Nobody wants to be poor and nobody wants really to shop in poor people's shops. We all would rather walk the aisles at Waitrose.

Kwik Save went from a 1.6% share of the national grocery basket in 2005 to 0.2% in 2006. It went through the clutches of Robert Tchenguiz - who knows a canine when he sees one - and was thought to have been losing £40 million a year. It was voted one of the UK public's least favourite brands. So, its demise was hardly surprising.

But the focus on the people at the sharp end who sit at the tills is unusual. Seeing those Kwik Save staff not being able to pay their rent or feed their kids is a timely reminder of how some among the other half live. Most of the talk at the moment in retail is about the private equity boys who are coining it in the tens of millions with their complex clever dick financial formulae and congratulating themselves on paying less tax than their cleaning ladies.

I know you can't buck the market and I know that the free flow of capital is necessary for all our benefits. But this stark illustration of the enormous and widening gulf that now exists between the haves and the have nots is more characteristic of a Third than a First World country. Sometimes what's going on out there at the moment can appear crass in its harshness and inequity. It can all whiff of a sort of decadence the like of which one saw during the last days of the Roman empire when the Barbarians were at the gate and it all ended in tears.

And there's now the likelihood of long drawn out class actions from furious US litigants - there are no litigants more angry and persistent than American ones, egged on by the worst ambulance-chasing legal system on the planet.

Certainly BA's dodgy huddles in a corner with Virgin about price-fixing fuel surcharges were outrageous and confirm widespread suspicions that the airline industry worldwide continues as a protected series of stitch-ups and sharp business practice.

However, Virgin's behaviour leaves an equally nasty taste in the mouth. Nobody likes a sneak, least of all a grinning one. I'm sure Virgin regards its grassing-up BA to the authorities and the way they have handled the affair as a PR triumph. (As always.) Not me. Branson has an unerring record of whining to regulators of every variety. Virgin always portrays itself as the victim of playground bullying by the big guy - whether it be BA, BSKyB or rivals in the mobile phone and rail games. The high profile of the Virgin brand means that when it shrieks in protest the hacks come loyally running and scribbling, although in taking on the ruthless Sky Branson has bitten off more than he can chew.

No. On this occasion we'd like to see Old Beardie lose the smile for a photocall, don a hair shirt and actually say sorry personally for his organisation's misdeamenours.

So, what's going on? I don't pretend fully to understand the finer intricacies of Collateralised Debt Obligations, covenant-light loans or the murkier depths of the sub-prime mortgage game in the US. What I do understand is a growing unease among many in business with those whose trade is financial manipulation and who, over the last five years have devised ever-subtler and more arcane monetary schemes as they push the boundaries in search of greater reward.

This has all added to what the great Greenspan terms 'irrational exuberance'. And that always ends in tears. As that old curmudgeon Martin Wolf from the FT put it yesterday: 'Ours has been a world of the "no income, no job, no assets" 100% mortgage... and of the "in go poor credits and out comes a triple A-rated security" financial alchemist. It has been a world of confidence, cleverness and too much cheap credit.'

It may be good that we're heading back towards an era of sound money but there's going to be a lot of fear, loathing and pain first. And if dodgy dealing by those Masters of the Universe from Wall St and Canary Wharf tips what has been a fairly sound global economy into recession, then business will want someone to blame. Their wallets may all be bulging like never before after enormous bonuses, but financiers might find themselves figures of opprobrium in the months to come.

There have been screams and whoops and tears on the street outside the school gate. Plus naturally - this being 2007 - plenty of those big hugs favoured by teenagers. I got a call at lunchtime from my godson who scored 11 A stars plus a plain A in Physics. His father whom I've known since we were both nine got an "unclassified" in his O-level Physics which in old money meant a fail.

I've got my worries about our exam system, as you will see, but I'm growing a little weary of the annual sneer-fest that greets kids who feel they've done well. Belittling their achievements is pretty unfair - all they've done is play the game into which they are forced. The game is a desperate one. After that now notorious promise back in 1997 that the focus would be on "education education education" New Labour dare not see a fall back in the annual quality of exam results. It has to be onwards and upwards year after year and the figures now have the macabre spectacle of the celebration of Stalinist Five Year production targets.

The ritual condemnation of exam grade devaluation combined with a general sense that Einstein would have struggled to achieve 5 A stars back in his teens is not really getting us anywhere. But the problem will not go away especially if large numbers of top schools wind up going off piste and dropping GCSEs and A levels altogether because they have little or no value for their pupils. At the other end of the scale there remain an appalling number of 16 year-old who are leaving school without basic literacy, numeracy and communication skills. So the system fails kids at both ends of the ability spectrum.

I don't think I ever worked so hard in my life as I did for school exams. They involved cramming great vast swathes of information into my leaky brain over a ghastly Summer term - everything from Macbeth soliloquies, through the intricacies of glacial erosion to Ohms Law. I'd forgotten most of it by the following September. But the process has left a lasting legacy.

I'm now in my mid 40s and I still have the odd nightmare about my exam results - never university finals but always O and A levels. They are of the classic anxiety type in which I've never done enough revision and, my god, they are still deeply troubling. I was convinced then there had to be a better way of assessing children's academic capabilities and, thirty years later, I am still of that opinion (not least because I only got a C in O-level Physics and deserved better). Goodness only knows what the lasting effects of testing kids at primary school is going to be.

Toynbee has plenty to say about the rich. Very little of it positive. In a recent Guardian column she likened their behaviour in the UK in 2007 to the last days of Rome with a dash of 'Babylonian excess' thrown in. She has joined Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman to express outrage that some women are paying £10,000 for a handbag. On the morning of our encounter her newspaper, while leading its front page with the bad news that City bonuses had hit a record high with a £14bn payout, noted with distaste that there has been a 29% rise in sales of Bentleys in the last year.

She is unimpressed by the process of trickle down economics. Toynbee doesn't have much time for those who argue that the wealthy not only create jobs and - sometimes - pay substantial amounts of tax into the exchequer but also spend large amounts that help the world keep spinning.

So, what on earth does she advocate as a solution here? Does she believe that the Prime Minister needs to sit down at Number 10 with some trade union leaders over the legendary 'beer and sandwiches' as they did back in the '70s, to establish an incomes policy for those in the City plus a ceiling on what City spouses may spend on a handbag?

I pointed out that while we inhabit a country in which we enjoy individual liberty it's up to each rich person to chose their handbag or their Bentley, in the same way as it's the right of those who live in straitened means in social housing to have a Sky dish if they wish. It isn't the business of the state to tell us what to do with our cash and those of us that pay tax part with a pretty substantial chunk of our income already.

The practical measures that Toynbee advocates to get us a firmer moral footing include the following: she wants a 50% income tax rate beginning at £100,000 and another even higher rate for 'the supersonic.' (British GPs who now earn an average of £106,000 might have something to say about that.) She wants tax returns made public, as is the case in the US, so naming and shaming of dodgers becomes easier. And she wants an end to buy-to-let 'tax breaks' which will not impress the large swathe of middle England which has been buying property as a nest egg for old age.

Some of the listeners pointed out that this all smacked of the politics of envy. Boris Johnson, if he'd been listening may have repeated his verdict that Polly 'incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain... She is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf'n'safety fascism.' (Ms Toynbee, for her part, terms Boris a 'Jester, toff, self-absorbed sociopath and serial liar.') 

This argument and Toynbee and Johnson's mutual detestation shows, among other things, that in the UK many of those who watch from the pavement as a Ferrari rasps by still want to scratch it because the driver must be a bastard rather a source of admiration. The atmosphere has changed in this country when it comes to the acceptability of wealth since the '70s. But when the gap appears as broad as it is at the moment things might get seriously ugly. Someone needs to come up with a cogent argument why it's fair and reasonable that a cleaner in Barclays Canary Wharf gets £7 an hour and Bob Diamond gets £25m a year.

I believe there's a real risk that the wealthy are currently in danger of losing the moral argument completely if they continue to refuse to come out of the trenches and fight for themselves. Rather than rely on poor saps like me to do the dirty work.

Our health service has taken a bit of a kicking this week from Sir Derek Wanless, who took a dim of view of how the organisation has spent the £43 billion budget increase over the last five years. The NHS, he says, is not making sufficiently good progress because of a worsening in the UK lifestyle, IT delays and disasters but also a failure to improve productivity. Pay increases have not been matched by higher output.

My son was born at one of the major London teaching hospitals which hosts well over 6,000 births a year. I have to say that the care we received, when it came to our turn, was pretty outstanding. One could not help but be impressed by the professionalism and kindness of the staff who were, for the most part, run ragged by the demand for their time. The way in which they juggled birth centre beds for inductions, caesareans, sets of twins and incoming emergencies was quite something. One of our NCT mates got to an 8 centimetre dilation in the waiting room and nearly had junior by the water cooler.

One of the first things you learn - because they tell you - is that midwives are pretty hacked-off by their pay rates and the chronic staff shortages in their discipline. In London they cannot afford high housing costs  and many are leaving or going part-time to make up their earnings in other ways. (An ex-nurse who then became a hack on MT is now a baby masseur.)   We have 25,000 midwives in the UK but 55 per cent of them work part time. Some estimates suggest we need 10,000 more. The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) says recruitment is not keeping pace with a rising birth-rate, which has gone up 12.5% since 2001 - from 564,871 that year to 635,679 in 2006.

One of the reasons our birth rate is rising is inward migration. Talk about the Big Tent - we were sharing ward space with many mothers from the Ivory Coast, Eastern Europe and Asia. A lot of folk get very hot under the collar about this and one in four births in London is now to a parent born outside the UK. I've been known to have my odd Daily Mail moment on the subject and protest about NHS resources going to those from outside who haven't contributed to the tax pot.

Seeing the baby factory up close left a different impression. These children are being born in the UK where there is plenty for them to do. And what if some of those babies born last week turn to midwifery as their vocation, as did large numbers of 50s and 60s female migrants from the Caribbean.  Problem solved.

In The Guardian recently under the ominous headline, "Financial Management is the new Witchcraft. We need to break the spell" Hastings sounded off about the finance sector - source of the vast majority of the UK's serious wealth.

Incomprehension makes us the City's prisoners, notes Hastings. This fear and lack of understanding is similar to the power which witches held over medieval peasantry who toiled, like Baldrick, knee deep in ordure. And we all know what the public used to do to witches because as a profession they unnerved the populace so much - they were tossed onto the village bonfire.

It's all down to secrecy and clandestine operation. In Victorian times wealth creation  was somehow all so much more simple. You built your dark Satanic mill below the Pennines, you drafted in hundreds of folk from the countryside to operate the machinery, (if you were of a mildly philanthropic bent then you even provided them with a roof over their head)  you imported the cotton and you wove the cloth. And you made lots and lots of cash. You got a top hat and acquired a peerage. All very visibly.

The serious money is made these days in closed Mayfair rooms, according to arcane mathematical formulae that are often beyond the capability of the planet-brained Robert Peston to explain to an increasingly sceptical and bemused nation. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that - you'd be mad these days to try to get rich by setting up your plant in a Pennine Valley rather than the Pearl River Delta - but some explanation is necessary. Especially when things go pear-shaped. 

We're coming back to the same issue that I highlighted in the last blog following my gloves off encounter with La Toynbee - a lack of openness. Where is anyone who works in the area of the money markets when we need to know what's gone wrong? Maybe even someone who might say, "sorry, we cocked up."

As Hastings says, "the challenge for the City of London is to convince the public that, even if its workers are extravagantly rewarded for their services, what they do benefits the rest of us; that their activities are not exclusively self-serving." If the finance industry won't stand up and explain itself then the risks are legion - not least an unwelcome return to the politics of envy.

Everyone who was there must remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth when, 10 years ago, those deadly killjoys from Brussels announced they were getting rid of duty free within the EU. It was going to be the death of our airports. When it was abolished the duty free market was worth several billion a year in Europe and the British - never ones to miss the opportunity of something for nothing - bought nearly a quarter of the total.   

We were big fans of weird foreign hooch. What is unusual about the averagely stocked British drinks cupboard is not its volume but how long most of the contents have been languishing there. Having bought spirits and exotic drinks while abroad we hoard them like boozy squirrels and then forget they're even there. 

Two factors figured strongly in our devotion to duty free. The first was nostalgia. Returning to the UK and the misery of work after a holiday we've always been great ones for trying to re-create the pleasure of foreign lands through native varieties of alcohol.  Everyone knows, for example, that retsina is just about palatable in a taverna the full flush of holiday felicity. (You need something with a bit of edge to cut through most Greek food.) Somehow, though, retsina never tastes quite so good when consumed on a wet winter's evening in Crouch End.

The second is pure serial acquisitiveness. Even when you already have the full array of whisky, gin, vodka, rum and brandy, there are those who feel they have to complete the set of the socially acceptable drinks cabinet.

The British are extremely resistant to novelty when it comes to buying spirits at home in the supermarket or off licence. A subjective telephone survey of a number of friends and acquaintances who had clearly got very relaxed while abroad trawled up a remarkable range of exotica gathering dust. There was Fernet Branca, the Italian herbal digestif. 'We tried it once in Florence but I can't remeber what it tasted like.'

Another had some Pineau des Charentes, a sweet aperitif from Cognac. 'I think my mother in law brought us back that one.'

Several had grappa, the fiery Italian spirit made from discarded skins, pips and stalks, which is best left, along with after shave, to Hemingway clones. And there were also quite a few bottles of cassis - a delight nestling under a bone dry white of a Summer's evening in Provence, a bit out of place during a British December. 'I was sure I'd get to use it in summer pudding,' said one sad owner.

Another had a miniature of 'Mahon gin' from the Balaeric island of Minorca, not known as a centre of spirit-making excellence. 'It was the only excursion on the island. They blend it with different treacles. Mine must be 20 years old and still in the back of a kitchen cupboard.' I can even lay claim to a bottle of Lebanese arrack, unopened and certain to stay that way for the foreseeable future unless a platoon of Druze militia comes to visit.

In his support of the Chancellor Alistair Darling's controversial - some would say suicidal - moves on capital gains tax, Wolf's has been an almost lone howl in the wilderness. I fear in his contrarian analysis of Darling's CGT moves that he may well be talking a fair bit of sense, despite the fact that his scribblings have attracted squeaks of outrage - not least from his old editor Richard Lambert, now top banana at the CBI.

A bit of back-to-basics might not go amiss here. The simple facts are that if you earn shed loads of cash - and those who do have enjoyed a pretty nice run under New Labour since 1997 - then you should expect to pay your fair share of tax. (And I'm not talking about stupid Old Labour shenanigans like the 'politics of envy' 98% rates of the '60s and '70s.) If you're rich you won't get much back for your tax pains. You won't be using the government's second-rate schools, you take a helicopter rather than struggle on its pot-holed, heavily-congested roads and you definitely won't be relying on its meagre state pension when you hang up your boots. But coughing up is all part of the social contract and why you'd rather live here than in Paris or New York, or, god forbid, Frankfurt. 

In many ways the wealthy only have themselves to blame for getting some heat. With stories floating around this summer about big cheeses in private equity paying less to the Exchequer than their cleaning ladies and all sorts of evil tales about fleet-footed Res Non Doms getting off scot free, it was clear there was trouble coming down the line. Even the Tories scent political gain in squeezing the wealthy at the moment.

It's also true that there won't be many entrepreneurs out there who don't bother taking any risks in business because now under the new regime they will only receive 82% of the gain from their businesses rather than 90%. The thing about the truly entrepreneurial is that they can't help forging forward and taking risk - it's the way they are made.

As the wise old Wolf noted: 'Arguments from relatively wealthy people that they ought to have their incomes taxed at far lower rates than everyone else, because of the benefits they shower upon us, should be treated with contempt.' So, cough up and quit whinging - it's not that bad, and ultimately you aren't going to be that much poorer. Don't you know there's a war to pay for?

Years ago when I was a student I took a temporary holiday job at the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys - now part of the Office of National Statistics - and what a sorry place it was. Day in day out I was ticking boxes and checking endless questionnaires surrounded by incredibly bored and disaffected clerical officers, several of whom were hugely earnest, Little Red Book-brandishing Maoists from Middlesex University. What a waste of public money we were. I would hope that most of our efforts are now performed by machines.

The news that the number of British nationals in work has fallen in the past two years as 540,000 foreign workers have replaced them is pretty amazing stuff. Hilarious that the Conservatives find it 'profoundly disturbing'. Why? If Gordon Brown is really going to give 'a British job to every British worker' then he's going to have to reform our dysfunctional education system and work out a method of getting the hardcore unemployed back into work. These two tasks have stumped New Labour since 1997.

It seems to be incredibly un-PC to say it, but one of the conclusions that we can draw from the figures is surely that the indigenous population either cannot or will not fill the available job vacancies. But I cannot at this point launch into a tirade into the inadequacies of the UK workforce compared to their Polish counterparts. The bathroom I had done in my house recently was marked by incompetence on an epic scale - demonstrated by Brits, Poles and even someone who has previously been in the media and now masquerades as a plumber.