A forgettable year in many respects - but here are my highlights.

Well that was probably a year that most of you are quite keen to forget. Except if you are a banker, of course, in which case you’re probably already in Barbados nestling down with your bonus and bottle of chilled Pol Roger while preparing to whoop it up with Michael Winner.

Having spent most of the last twelve months stuck in the economic mire, now we’re all knee deep in ice or slush. (I’m amused to note, by the way, that while the Eurostar is having trouble with current climatic conditions, the steam-driven Bluebell Railway in Sussex – where I am due to travel on the Santa Special tomorrow along with several hundred ear-splitting toddlers - is currently working normally despite the fact that its locomotives are more than a century old.)

I hope over the year that we’ve brought you some little rays of sunshine both online and in the magazine. Our highlights have been many: despite the downturn we’ve continued to produce an award-winning  monthly magazine that, unlike its competitors, has refused to compromise on editorial quality by slashing budgets. Our scoop of the year was with the mysterious man of the shadows Matthew Freud, who opened his mouth for the first time in nearly a decade. (And then immediately regretted it.) The portrait of Freud – naked in the style of his uncle Lucien - drew gasps from all over town and led to a bidding war for the original oil painting, with Rebekah Wade in the forefront.

We’ve also submitted Kenneth Clarke, Mark Thompson of the BBC, Sir Victor Blank of Lloyds TSB and Luke Johnson to the 3500 word grilling. We even persuaded the reclusive head of the NHS, David Nicholson – a man with a £120 billion annual budget – to answer a number of tricky questions. Life is about to get far tougher for him.

MT readers need to know how to weather this recession intact. So this year the magazine has emphasised a regular diet of practical material:   “How the bonus culture goes wrong",  “How to keep the cash flowing,” and “Survival Tips from the Silvertops.”

Our roundtable discussion on the pressing issue of business reputation attracted CEOs from Diageo, BSkyB, Unilever and Aviva to produce a much talked about feature on the public’s loss of trust in business. Our 35 Women Under 35 sub-brand has developed a vigorous life all of its own with networking events and seminars. This year the list contained the first appearance by a transsexual, Kate Craig-Wood.

Britain’s Most Admired Companies awards at Claridges three weeks back again attracted the crème de la crème of UK business.  Well done to BSkyB for winning the title.

Well, at least we’ve past the shortest day yesterday - and we can now all head for the sunlit uplands of 2010 with a song in our hearts. Well, sort of. Have a Kool Yule – you deserve it -  and see you again on January 4th.

Strikes are damaging to everyone, except the competition. But BA and Royal Mail have to change.

I watched Channel 4 News last night – BA strike – followed by the Panorama about the lamentable state of the Royal Mail. It was enough to remind you of the bad old days of 3 day weeks, when I did my homework by candlelight and the rats ruled London’s streets.

Relations between management and staff need to have got pretty awful within an organisation for the workers to down tools. It’s like a marriage where the rowing has escalated into chucking things, including fists. The company is badly damaged by loss of business and reputation, the staff lose money; the competition is the only winner. Everyone gets angrier and more miserable. There has to be an easier way, you might think. Get in the marriage guidance folk at ACAS.  

What you cannot argue with is that BA and the Royal Mail desperately need to change how they do things, otherwise oblivion beckons. I’d rather travel BA than Ryanair any day, but you simply cannot sustain a contract system which pays a 'cabin services director' £56,325 when the equivalent at Ryanair makes do with two bob and a toffee apple. Beardy Branson only pays his lush Barbie and Kens who shove the trolleys nineteen grand.

BA cabin crew go on about Willie Walsh being confrontational and not shaking their hands when he’s onboard in seat 1A. He may be no charmer and a little deficient in the Emotional Intelligence stakes, but he has a job to do – to ensure his airline survives. And many will not make it out of this downturn. But he clearly hasn’t done the job of winning hearts and minds. And if the strike goes ahead, screwing up the emotion-laden plans of a million Christmas travellers, then everyone in his airline will suffer – staff and management.   

As far as the Royal Mail is concerned, I fear the game is up and in the medium term the organisation is a basket case. Looking at that footage of all those millions of letters whizzing through high-tech sorters, I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth we still bother with paper, stamps, franking machines, and postie gallantly lugging them all down the street when the net does away with such a wasteful process. (Except getting your copy of MT delivered each month, of course.)  

The postman Panorama interviewed was a thoroughly depressed man who’d been pacing the streets for 26 years and looked ready to burst into tears at the prospect of being told to walk at 4mph to increase his efficiency. You felt some sympathy for him. But many Royal Mail people I come across are surly and not very likeable at all. Quite the reverse of charming brand ambassadors who stop for a kindly chat with lonely OAPs, they speed down the 20mph street where I live in their trucks and Transits at 35mph plus, giving you the finger and a mouthful of abuse if you dare to make any comment. At their worst they appear like an unmanageable rabble, whingeing and fiddling while their organisation is levelled by the firestorm of the market.    

God that was dull. Where was the stirring rhetoric, the grand gesture, the bold decision making?

What a disappointment. When the big news is that Bingo duty is coming down by 2% and that there is to be a boiler scrappage scheme next year, you know that not much has happened in the PBR. I’ve just watched the Chancellor’s speech in its entirety (well, as much as my struggling web connection would allow) and I am afraid to say I’m not sure it was worth the 45minutes of my time it took up.

For an event that had the potential to be one of the more seismic economic policy announcements of the 21st Century, it was about as much fun as doing your tax return. And rather less rewarding. Where was the stirring rhetoric, the grand gesture, the bold decision making?

Instead of a great vision for national economic rehabilitation, complete with the necessary-but-painful big cuts in public sector spending which we all know are on the way, what we got was a sort of steady-as-she-goes exercise in treading fiscal water.

OK the banks are going to have to pay 50% tax on bonuses, but we knew that was coming anyway thanks to Robert Peston, et al. And NI is going up again, too, and there will be a cap on public sector pay-rises of 1%.  All very sensible, but no sign of anything on a scale that seems anywhere near large enough to deal with the mess that our economy is in right now.

I should have know better of course – high drama has never been Darling’s style, and there is the little matter of a general election on the way. What’s the point in making a Churchillian appeal of the ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ variety, when by doing so you stand a good chance of putting yourself and your cabinet colleagues out of a job? What politician wouldn’t choose to have a worse mess of their own making to clear up in six months time, rather than having risked handing power on a plate to the other side by trying to fix things now?

Darling’s professed reasoning is that it remains too soon to start slashing public spending; that doing so would damage our chances of recovery more seriously than adding yet more zeroes onto the already scary string of digits that is the PSBR.

He did drop a few hints that the worst may be yet to come – debt as a proportion of GDP will peak at nearly 80%, he says, and not until 2015 – but on the whole this was an exercise in marking time. Time that by the end of next year, may end up looking like it’s been wasted.

If you want my tip, buy shares in boiler-makers. At least they ought to do well.

It's a bit late for the Government to start getting over-protective about our industrial crown jewels.

So Peter Mandelson has waded into the Cadbury battle by warning of 'huge opposition' from HM Government if hungry Americans come over here in search of a 'fast buck'. I’m not quite sure what he means here; there wouldn’t be much that was fast about Kraft paying off the kind of debt it will need to take on to fund such a purchase. Kraft’s bid is about many things – a huge, dull conglomerate in desperate search of growth before someone else nabs the tasty morsel that is Cadbury – but a fast buck surely is not one of them.

Lord M’s intervention is unprecedented in modern times. But these are very odd times. Anyone would think there’s going to be an election within the next six months.

The truth is his rhetoric is an empty threat.  A classic piece of sabre-rattling that will lead to nothing. (Not even that many votes in Bourneville, I’d guess.) It’s not as if he has a great track record in this area : the last time he threatened to get involved was over MG Rover and look what a calamitous dog’s breakfast that turned out to be.

Cynics might also ask where this concern was when the government flogged off the UK’s utilities - water, gas , electricity? Where was this reluctance to part with crown jewels when the Treasury needed cash to ramp up public sector spending by off-loading Westinghouse, DERA (which became Qinetiq) and our nuclear industry? Where was this sense of neding to protect our national future and our security when BAA and all our ports went under the auctioneer's gavel?

The point is that we used to feel smug about allowing the market to do its work. We knew the market was the only way. We sneered at the French who hung on to everything - even their yogurt makers - as a matter of the highest national self-interest.

But now we’re skint and we have diddly-squit left to flog, it appears the Brits are changing their minds. We even need a supertax on bankers. His Lordship may now be for turning but it’s a bit late in the day. The stable door is wide open and they all bolted years back.  The only thing left sat in the straw is the Dartford Crossing. And not even Del Boy made a bid for that.  

Sky’s rise has been extraordinary. But there are challenges ahead in the next couple of years.

At the modest age of only twenty, BSkyB is the youngest company ever to have taken the BMAC title. The speed of this achievement - from registration at Companies House to being the most admired business in the land - is quite extraordinary. It’s a tribute to a ruthlessly focussed, highly competitive outfit which has left its media peer group for dead.

I recall its launch very clearly – there was all sorts of hilarity about ‘squarials’, satellites that didn’t work and embarrassingly bad content. The first few years were very precarious indeed and nearly dragged founder Rupert Murdoch under. But the turning point came in 1992, with the first exclusive deal to show live Premier League football. Murdoch believed, quite correctly, that live sport – especially football – was the ‘battering ram’ for pay television. It takes someone who can remember Grandstand or the bow-tied and beaming Dickie Davies to realise how brutally he has battered the oppo to the canvas.  

Sceptics thought recession might be its undoing. Sky costs me getting on for sixty quid a month, but I’m not the only one reluctant to give it up. Indeed, it’s still growing and is now in six million UK homes. With the arrival of high definition, broadband and now football matches available on your iPhone, the innovation keeps coming.  

Now it has to move onto its next phase – out of adolescence and into maturity. Sky has been a pretty bolshie kid. The previous CEO (now chairman) James Murdoch loved being The Outsider, constantly referring to Sky’s ‘challenger’ culture and relentlessly attacking the TV establishment. But Sky is now the establishment, and has attracted the notice of those who feel it wields too much power. So the TV ‘Crown Jewels’ have now been extended to include The Ashes and there are competition rumblings about widening access to live football. And how will it cope with the furious growth of streamed internet content? The next couple of years will be crucial to Sky’s long term future.

Down at the other end of the size scale, there are two worthy sector winners. First is Majestic, which carried off the Specialist Retailers division, beating such giants as Mothercare, WH Smith and Carphone Warehouse.  It’s a great business, brilliantly built up by the estimable Tim How. And now you can carry away six bottles rather than a full case after a hard day at the office.

The other is Dunelm, which won the General/Home Retailers Sector. This company is an amazing success story. It was founded in the late 70s and only listed 3 years ago. By concentrating on thrifty customers after good value for money, it has quietly gone about toppling previous Most Admired giants such as Kingfisher and Argos. Run by Will Adderley, the son of the founders, it is based in Leicester and is now aiming for 150 stores.

Incidentally, this year's bottom ten included (alongside the likes of ITV, Enterprise Inns and Sports Direct) Bank of Ireland, Aer Lingus and Allied Irish Bank. It's clearly been a rotten year for reputations on the other side of the Irish sea…