As the Germans look ship-shape, Greece's finances are in a worse state than ever. What does that it all mean for us?

So Germany confirms its position this morning as Europe’s top economic machine. (Not that any sensible individual doubted this for one moment even during the maelstrom of the last 3 years.) . In the second quarter its GDP zoomed ahead by a remarkable 2.2%  There hasn’t been a faster rate of growth than this since reunification back in 1990.  Punters worldwide are back in the market for BMWs – which had some cracking sales figures out this week -  and Germany’s other high value manufactured goods. And they’ve got a half way decent football team for the first time in years.

But there is far less good news from what those Euro economists term the 'peripheral' nations.  Even less charitable individuals insist on referring to them as the PIIGS (Portugal Ireland Italy Greece Spain) Growth in the sty is pitiful.   

The Greeks are enduring the agony of major downturn at the moment and face the prospect of a prolonged slump. The Greek statistical service – never the most accurate with its use of the abacus in the first place – reckons that the Greek economy shrunk by 3.5% in the three months to the end of June. The Athens regime hasn’t been helped by the country’s truckers spending weeks manning the barricades.  These stats are truly grim because the second half of the Greek year – when few wish to stretch out on a rainy beach in Mykonos  – is normally much quieter when it comes to collecting other people’s Euros to fill the hard pressed Finance Ministry’s coffers.   

The fact that the Germans are saving at an unprecedented rate rather than spending their Euros is bad news for everyone else. The towels are staying at home, so to speak. The only question for them remains how much of their war chest they are prepared to sacrifice propping up the Euro and its miscreant members in the periphery.

Equally concerning is the plight of Ireland where the government continues to have to pay sky high interest rates for the bonds it issues to remain solvent. The comparative yield on these bonds came very close to a record difference between those issued in Dublin and those from Berlin  earlier this week. This means the investor-confidence gap between Germany and Ireland is growing again.

This really is worrying because Ireland has endured a huge amount of pain already after profound cuts. The assumption was that this lipo-suction would make the patient better. But it doesn’t appear to have done in the eyes of investors.  It just appears to have left the patient weakened, vulnerable and with a lot of spare flesh sagging around the waistband.  

So where does this leave us Brits? Up with the Deutsch or down with the PIGS? Well, we’re about to head for the slab Irish- style this Autumn as the scalpel gets to work. We still like to think we’re an economic class above the peripherals and we can, unlike them, still devalue our currency to make us more competitive. The systemic meltdown has maybe avoided but we’ve got some serious glums to endure for a while yet.  I’m off on hols to see how the Italians are coping. See you in September.  

The Government needs to be careful that it doesn't go overboard with this guilt trip.

We’ve got the glums in the UK. A poll by Ipsos Mori has shown that consumers in the UK are among the most pessimistic in the world when it comes to their country’s economic situation. The UK economy was thought to be in “a very bad state” by 34% of domestic consumers. Only the Spanish (63%) and the Japanese (41%)  were more down in the mouth than this.

In the developing world, by contrast, life appears to be a bowl of cherries as everyone heads for the sunny uplands. In India, an extraordinary 85% of consumers see their country's economic situation as good. In China that figure is 77%, and in Brazil 65%.

Indians are amazing. In a country where 40% of the population live below the international poverty line – that’s 456 million individuals making do on less than $1.25 per day – nearly nine in ten of them still think everything’s great. That is a classic developing world phenomenon: when you’re down, and have been down for time immemorial, the only way is up.

Traditionally in the UK, we’ve been quite a sceptical nation. Steady and phlegmatic. We’re not quite as dour as the Finns but we don’t do wide-eyed, optimistic whooping, thigh-slapping and 'way to GO!!' stuff. (Neither do the Americans, any more. They are, according to the survey, only marginally less miserable about things than us at the moment: 13% of Brits see our economic situation as “good”, but only 18% of Americans feel that way.)   

Part of our problem at the moment is that the Government is going out of its way to make us feel bad, not good. We have all been very naughty indeed, Brits have been told, ad nauseam. So we have to stand in the austerity corner, without sweets or the full range of social security benefits, until we see the error of our ways.

I think Cameron and Osborne need to be careful as their Government advances into its next phase. Because if they continue to lay the 'feel-bad' edict on with a trowel, then consumer confidence - already pretty badly dented - will fall even further. That won’t benefit anyone. Vince Cable may have many virtues, but helping a nation feel good about itself isn’t among them.

Our economic plight is not as bad as the Spanish or the Greeks. If I was a Greek, I’d feel there was quite a lot to be miserable about at the moment - with next to no light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope that our low score on this survey is just a reflection of our slightly more cautious outlook generally, rather than the possibility that we’re all collapsing into an apathetic depression. 

I'm all for wealthy individuals giving their money away. But the issue isn't straightforward.
 
John D. Rockefeller said: 'It is a poor man who dies rich'. Well, by this measure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are going to die poor. Or rich. Or whatever. The news that Gates has organised a get-together of a few dozen of his billionaire friends and persuaded them to hand over half their wealth to worthy charitable causes has created a minor sensation.
 
Buffett himself has promised to give away 99% of his wealth. 'We called 70 to 80 people in the Forbes list,' said Buffett. 'It was a very soft sell but 40 signed up'. Those who have failed to sign up will find the old boy from Omaha on their tails as he continues to pursue them to do the right thing with their lucre. 'Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future, so we’ll keep working,' commented Warren over his cheeseburger and cherry Coke.
 
The whole extraordinary phenomenon of celeb-philanthropy has really taken off in the US. The super-rich compete against each other to give the most – it’s philanthropic willy-waving of the highest order. The latest offers are expected to inject at least $60 billion (£40 billion) into charities, and you can bet there will be more to come as they fight for a generosity mention in Vanity Fair.
 
I don’t for one minute want to dissuade wealthy individuals, from the UK or the US, from giving away money and these people should be applauded for their generosity. But the issue isn’t entirely straightforward.
 
Firstly, proportion is all. A billion-dollar giveaway gets loads of headlines, and it will go a lot further than ten in the effort to discover a cure for malaria. But it’s the thought and the sacrifice that count. One should be no less impressed by the generosity of normal (and even quite poor) folk who give away chunks of their cash that they could quite easily spend on food or the necessaries for themselves. What, in god’s name, is Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, supposed to do with the half of his $13.5 billion fortune that he hasn’t donated to charity anyway? Such sums are superfluous to any requirement he’ll ever have. How many yachts, football teams, Faberge eggs or Frank Lampard signed gold Iphones can a guy have in a lifetime? 
 
Secondly, very rich people rarely give away vast sums without influence or control over where it goes. They don’t just sprinkle it out of the window of the Gulfstream willy-nilly. This has a good side: the rich tend to be good with cash and making it work for its living, and many charities are poor at spending money. Nobody would argue with Bill Gates' crusade to eliminate malaria. That is a good thing. How can it be anything but a good thing? But choosing malaria rather than, for example, helping kids with learning disabilities in Kansas is a political act. These are the tough choices to do with resource allocation – and they are especially tough at the moment – that governments make. And governments are elected by us. Bill and Warren aren’t.
 
But these are quibbles. Much of the money given will do good things and those who benefit from it will be grateful. Would that we were better at it in the UK, where giving to support charity or the arts is poor compared to the US. It’s actually been quite a bad 'sleb' giving couple of days. We’ve watched the wretched appearance of mega-rich Naomi Campbell at the war crimes trial in the Hague: she claims she gave Taylor’s diamonds to a flunky who was then to give them to charity, and what happened to the dirty stones thereafter is anyone’s guess. It makes you wonder what sort of a world people like Naomi live in. You would have thought that her advisors – legal and PR – might have recommended a touch of respect for a UN War crimes trial, even a smidgen of humility. Let’s hope she finds them fast and hands them over to Warren so he can hand (99% of) them back to the poor of Liberia.  

Despite my Welsh roots, I can't see much for the Principality to be optimistic about at the moment.
 
The more observant among you will have noticed that my surname is not very English. It’s very Welsh. When they found themselves on their uppers in Pembroke Dock during the 1860s, my ancestors got on the Son of Glendower’s equivalent of a coffin ship and didn’t get off until it reached Chile. However, something went wrong out there – maybe they didn’t take to the Merlots of the Maipo valley - and the Gwyther parents appear to have perished, leaving the kids to return to the UK and settle with a maiden aunt in the East End of London.
 
So I take a distant interest in what goes on West of Bristol and Chester. And it’s not often that news from the Principality fills one with hope or joy. Economically, Wales is not in good shape. It’s hugely reliant on the public sector, and its private sector businesses are too small in number and in size (Wales’ largest quoted company is Admiral insurance with 3,000 staff). The Welsh don’t make as much noise as the Scots or the Northern Irish when complaining about the relationship with Westminster, and as a result, fewer taxpayer pounds have been flung at them. They blew what soft money they got from the EU and HMG trying to attract large manufacturers into Wales with grant aid; these perfidious people then promptly dropped the Welsh in favour of cheaper workforces in Asia or Eastern Europe.
 
The think-tank Oxford Economics estimated that in 2006-07 – before the crash - tax revenues of £19.3bn were raised in Wales, compared to Government expenditure of £28.2bn - a fiscal gap of £9.1bn. Public expenditure per head in Wales is higher than most of the English regions (although lower than in Scotland or Northern Ireland). Up to date GDP per capita figures make pretty grim reading, as well. The UK is led by Greater London on £35,000, while at the bottom of the scale come perennial underachievers Scotland on £20,000 and Northern Ireland on £16,000. But the wooden spoon goes to Wales, with £15,200. Oxford Economics predicts that Wales will take longer than any other UK region to get back to employment levels pre-crash: it will be later than 2025.
 
The issue of the Welsh language is a vexed one. Its supporters protest it’s good for the Welsh economy – it certainly created jobs for public sector pen-pushers when the going was good. But now times are tougher, worrying about getting everything translated into an 'Insular Celtic' language only spoken by 22% of the population looks like fiddling while Carnarvon Castle burns. It was a fair bet that George Osborne was going to set about slashing wasteful things Welsh faster than you could say Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantysiliogogogoch. So the axe has already fallen on a chunk of Welsh language TV station S4C. S4C is a  Daily Mail news editor’s wet dream. It receives in excess of £100m a year from HM Government and is currently trying hard to explain how it officially recorded zero viewers on 196 out of its 890 programmes during one month earlier this year. (Indeed, just 139 of the station's entire output for the period were watched by more than 10,000 viewers.)
 
The estimable Julia Hobsbawn of Editorial Intelligence invited me to the first of her 'Names Not Numbers' get-togethers in Port Merion. When we all arrived, we were addressed by the Presiding Officer of the Welsh parliament Dafydd Elis-Thomas. Despite the fact that not one member of his audience understood the language (and his fluency in English), Mr Thomas addressed us in Welsh. We were all supplied with expensive Sennheiser headphone and a simultaneous translation – all no doubt paid for by the taxpayer.  
 
You could argue this was not only silly but slightly discourteous. Nelson Mandela didn’t open the World Cup with an oration in Xhosa. But apparently if it got out Lord Elis-Thomas had uttered a word in public in the language of the imperialists he’d have been lynched on his arrival back in the Caerdydd (Cardiff). Yaki da, (iechyd da) your Lordship.  
 
All this, and Tom Jones didn't even get to Number One this weekend. What hope is there for the Welsh when that happens?

TFL has taken its incompetencies to new lows. If they don't sort it out by 2012, there are going to be more than just red faces.

I’ve had a frothy rage about transport in London in this blog before. But it’s high time I was given a second chance to vent some more spleen. Just got to get some of this off my chest. Those of you living portfolio lives in the Yorkshire Dales or Western Pembrokeshire turn away or start to smirk now.

The Gwythers went off for a couple of days in Devon last weekend. After 48 hours of Dartmoor delight it was with a heavy heart that I started the engine at 4pm on Sunday to begin the long trek home. But it wasn’t caravans on the M5 or accidents near Swindon that brought us to grief. No – we made incredible progress until Heathrow, when we were felled by: the M4 bus lane. I thought this nasty white elephant, the *** son of Prescott, was going to be abolished. But no. It still sits there in all its idiocy. Apparently it has no cameras to police it and the Met have lost interest so your chances of being fined for joining the smattering of taxis are pretty minimal.

After an hour’s fuming, no sooner had we accelerated to about 9 mph on the Hammersmith flyover than we ground to a halt again, as to my utter disbelief the A4 at the Cromwell Road into London was shut – and will remain closed for the whole of August – to fix the gas mains. Every poor fool on the main road from the West into London is now forced into one lane and down through Earls Court.

It has been a shocking couple of years for the roads in London. The capital currently has more trenches being dug than during the Battle of the Somme. One dreads to think what the cost to business and UK plc will be, never mind the collective stress levels of the nation. Thames Water are replacing the Victorian mains everywhere at a pathetic pace with little or no regard for anyone except their shareholders. (Why can’t some really clever engineer invent a method to replace underground pipes that doesn’t involve digging down from the surface and then re-filling the hole?)  

What has to happen with utilities companies is they need to bear the true cost of the travel disruption they cause. It must be made to hurt them. This is the only way to end a shambolic system that enables them to get away with shutting roads for months on end – and the Albert Bridge for a year and a half.

Off the roads things are no better. This morning, as I waited amid the chaos caused by a busted train at Clapham Junction, I read the headline that the new trains on the Victoria underground line are  ‘23 times less reliable’ than the units they are replacing. The result has been even more nightmarish journeys than usual as these useless units – for which we have waited a decade - break down

Problems have been caused by computer software failures and from ‘over-sensitive door sensors’, which apply the brakes when passengers lean against the doors. This does beg the question that if you force 863 commuters paying the highest fares in the world into a carriage, crush them until they can hardly breathe in 40 degrees of heat, aren’t they going to tend to lean on the doors? Most are trying to batter their way out, like cattle en route to the slaughterhouse sensing this journey may be their last. A TfL spokeswoman said: ‘There have been some technical issues with the new trains but we are working hard to rectify these faults. Once the upgrade is finished in 2012 the new track and signalling will mean faster, smoother and more reliable journeys for our customers.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. All will be well and all manner of things will be well in the hands of TFL.

If TFL fired some of the hoards who work in their PR departments and actually hired a few half-way capable engineers and managers we would all be glad. If only it had some competition, it would be forced to treat those who use their service like customers, rather than a burden to be shifted about.

My point is simple. Those who run London’s transport infrastructure are not fit for purpose. It’s high time Mayor Boris had them ground down into chips to refill Thames Water’s trenches. (Ok that’s a bit extreme but we’re being pushed to extremes here). If we haven’t got our act together by the time of the Olympics, then the whole world will laugh louder than they did when we went 4-1 down to the Germans in Bloemfontein. The possibility that the Government will further squeeze the capital’s transport budgets between now and 2012 just doesn’t bear thinking about. If cities could up foundations, then London would leave the UK and relocate to Zurich. (And we’d take our contribution to the exchequer with us.) At least our value would be appreciated there.

What the Deepwater saga has taught us about BP, Big Oil, and the 'special relationship'.

There’s a tart irony that, as part of his punishment for Deepwater sins, Tony Hayward is being sent to Siberia. He’ll become a director at TNK-BP, the group’s troubled Russian joint venture, when he leaves the oil company in the autumn. The incoming CEO Bob Dudley will be able to give his ex-boss a few tips on dealing with the KGB and the lawless nature of doing business Russian-style - though after his savaging at the hands of the Americans, it may well feel like a walk in the park.  

I have a few thoughts:

1) Getting oil out of the ground is a dirty, dangerous and destructive business. Any amount of greenwash emitted by Big Oil over the last decade is a liquid fig leaf to divert attention from this fact. It’s not just carbon - rigs blow up, people get killed in Nigeria, Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Where oil is struck, trouble will follow. But oil is in demand and will get more expensive as it grows scarcer. That means risks to lives and reputation will continue to be taken.  

2) We remain addicted to oil and the USA is the most swivel-eyed, self-deluding junkie of the lot. The Green God Al Gore had an air conditioning system on his house that used more energy in a month than an African family will consume in a lifetime.

3) Tony Hayward was no PR man but that may well endear him to many. He was plain-speaking. He did ‘want his life back’ but you’re not allowed to say things like that in public. It didn’t mean he didn’t care and it probably didn’t mean he wasn’t sorry. He didn’t reign over his kingdom in the manner of his predecessor The Sun King of Battersea Park who might have made a better fist of handling the reputational damage. But post Lord Browne, it was felt BP needed a change. Unfortunately, after BP’s revolution, Hayward lacked Robespierre’s nouse.

4) Average Americans – by which I mean some of the Fox-watching couch potatoes in that great big bit between the East and West coasts – don’t like Brits much. We’re not beyond-the-pale, cheese eating surrender monkeys like the French but we seem to push the wrong buttons. That’s why Anthony Hopkins gets cast as Hannibal Lecter and Alan Rickman as every other baddie. This mystifies and hurts us. More importantly, for the soon-to-be US Hispanic majority, we are pretty much irrelevant. The relationship simply ain’t that special and hasn’t been for years. We’re the dutiful sheep dog that went blind and now lacks use.

5) The next time the United States embarks on one of its ill-advised excursions into Iraq or Afghanistan, the way the Americans appear to have reserved special vilification for a company because it is British  makes it rather less likely that we will march in alongside, shoulder-to-shoulder in the future. And that, in the long run, may well be a very good thing for GB Plc.

We could be heading for the dreaded double-dip. Didn't someone warn us this would happen?

It’s not seemly to be melodramatic or alarmist but it feels like we’re on a bit of a knife edge at the moment. With the dog days of August soon to be upon us, on the one side of the blade is a slow but rather anaemic recovery but on the other is a slide back down into a second hollow of recession. With such miserable, non-stop talk of cuts and austerity in the air, it’s hard to accentuate the positive at the moment. Today’s second quarter GDP figures look encouraging on the face of it, but there’s a nagging voice at the back of my mind telling me it’s only be a blip rather the start of a long-term upward trend.

Old Bernie Bernanke Bernanke doesn’t help much when he tells a congressional committee that the US economy was 'unusually uncertain' at the moment. It is: the numbers from the US in recent weeks have been disappointing. The bounce over the other side of the pond may still be that of the dead feline.  

There seems to be far too much grim news about. The Telegraph which has been the lead doom-sayer of this whole economic slowdown (with its Jeremiah-in-chief Ambrose Evans-Pritchard yelling like some mad monk week-in, week-out) has got a pretty gloomy piece recently about the commercial property sector by Jeremy Warner.

And Warner knows his onions. He cites a recent De Montfort University study which claims there are £300 billion worth of banking loans outstanding to the UK commercial property market of which around £50 billion are in breach of covenant. There has during this property cycle been a peak to trough fall of no less than 44% and some of those loans are now going to be called in and the blood will flow. Yikes, as they used to say in Scooby Doo.

I know commercial property isn’t the same kettle of fish as domestic bricks and mortar but weren’t we supposed to need a proper correction in property prices to get us back into sensible health again? As MT noted with alarm here, we couldn’t go on as we were spending on property.

Anyway, talking of property… we’re off to our new office in the burbs over the weekend. After 15 years in Hammersmith enough is enough, and we’re packing the crates for Teddington to join our chums on such fun magazines as Stuff, 442 and Gramophone. Even Dr Johnson would have tired eventually of London W6: the Hammersmith  roundabout and flyover never get any more charming; the meaty waft from West Cornwall Pasties in the precinct no more alluring; and the Habitat and Books Etc have closed down. The lure of the giant Westfield means worse is to come. MT’s bright new future lies in going further West to find that crock at the end of the rainbow. God knows, we may be able to dominate the whole Thames Valley. 

Blame those in control of the purse-strings, not the teachers.

Not a great week for education news. First off came the bombshell that Mark Elms, a primary school headmaster in Lewisham is going to take home a whisker under a  quarter of a million pounds for 2009-10. I’m sure Mr Elms is a dynamic and inspiring individual in an area where such people in education are thin on the ground. The kids of South East London may well have benefitted directly from his dedication.  But two hundred and fifty grand? (Mind you he’s earning it now being chased around South London on his five hundred quid bike by a load of righteous Daily Mail photographers.)  Lewisham is a toughish patch, but it’s not Helmand with roadside bombs going off and the chance of being stoned to death for daring to educate the young females of the community.

To coin a phrase from the boss of Shell – are you  telling me Mr Elms would have done any less good a job for £150k? What this shows is how smart and committed individuals within the public sector have been able to rook the system. It’s not just teachers – over recent years if you were  a consultant who landed a public sector contract, you wandered around shouting 'Bingo!' for the next three weeks, and ordered a new 911. But it’s not Mr Elms who should be blamed, it’s the poor governance of his bosses. Those who spend public money remain desperately bad at negotiating and getting value for money. The seller names a price and the mugs just ask where they should sign – assuming all the nonsense box-ticking of the procurement process is in order. There’s no commercial nouse.

Then we have Vince Cable’s bad news about university education. (My god, Vince loves delivering bad news, doesn’t he? He was born a Jeremiah and his enemies within the coalition are busily trying to remove his halo and turn him into Public Enemy Number 1. ) Tens of thousands of those who are applying to university this year won’t get places: there are 170,000 more candidates than spaces. And then those who are lucky enough to graduate face a new tax on their earnings. One way or the other, universities are going to get it in the neck from the new regime, and both of these occurrences are inevitable.

There has been a massive expansion in UK university education in the last 15 years and much of what is on offer is, put bluntly, crap. Many of these institutions are poorly run, doling out degrees of little or no value. That’s why it’s an utter nonsense that the rules currently say a degree from Leeds Metropolitan University should cost a UK undergraduate the same as one from Oxford. Things are now so out of control  that there are more than 20 universities so ineptly run that they are struggling to stay afloat, with seven on a secret ‘at risk’ list.   

Doing down Generation Y is not a nice business. They need all the help they can get at the moment. I went last year to give a talk to a bunch of undergraduates  at a very new provincial university. Call me a mean-spirited snob but it was a pretty depressing experience. Despite my best efforts, they were bored stiff during my scintillating 40 minute presentation: yawning, picking their finger nails. They all probably assumed they were going to walk straight into a job on Take a Break. What made my day was the one kid who came up to me afterwards telling me how he’d sorted out work experience on Le Monde in France and asking if I had any tips. I love it when you meet someone young, bright and enthusiastic who wants to get into our profession. But I was glad I wasn’t him trying to get a job at the moment. It’s not very nice out there.       

Apple isn’t the first to have prioritised style over substance.

I’ve held off requesting an iPhone4 from MT’s IT requisitioning department for the time being. I find it helps if your mobile phone actually enables you to talk to people as well as editing your video of the kids, joining online Raoul Moat appreciation societies, finding good dogging spots in Solihull and shining your shoes overnight.

Apparently if you hold the iPhone in a certain way (known as the ‘death grip’) you can’t get a signal, and if you can’t actually talk to anyone you might as well go back to a couple of yogurt pots connected by a taut string.

This is a shame because, being the sad, puerile fool that I am, I was looking forward to my first ever downloaded app being iFart which is one of the funniest things I’ve seen and heard in ages.

I can’t say I’m surprised Apple has come a cropper with this gorgeous, metal-banded gizmo. I’ve got a Nokia at the moment which, while it takes wonderful photos and even more stunning video, has a mind of its own when it comes to telephony. And trying to get your email….You may as well send someone back to the office to print them out from your desktop and send them by courier.

But I maintain a residual soft spot for Nokia – ever since my trusty old 6310 went into the bath and down the lav and still lived to tell the tale after a brief dry-out on the radiator. I also don’t like Apple’s breathtaking corporate arrogance much. God those guys over in Cupertino could do with a few lessons from Toyota in humility.  I’d quite like old Steve to get up on the stage in his trainers, crew neck and jeans and say ‘I goofed. Sorry.’ Maybe take a public ice cold bath and then be whipped with birch twigs from Oregon by some of those poor, sad saps who have queued for hours outside their O2 shop only to find they can’t even ring their girlfriends to say they’re going to be a bit late arriving at the Saddo/Nerd Apple Convention in Basildon.  

I know diddly squat about tech stuff and am the laughing stock of the office as a result. (I even need help with the more arcane aspects of Microsoft Outlook.) But I suspect that the problem with phones these days is that we are asking too much of them. And we are asking even more too much of the airwaves which simply cannot cope with the data demands of smart phones. Some techie bod the other day explained to me that Apple had made things even worse for the Vodafones and Oranges of this world by not listening to anyone in the mobile telephony business when it came to designing the innards and software around its smart phones. It hogs airwaves with its fat packets to a far worse degree than the oppo as a result.

I don’t doubt Steve J is a great man. I felt wretched the other day when I bought a new PC laptop rather than one of his beautiful Macbooks. It felt like I’d walked off with a Kia Cee’d  rather than a BMW M5. But great designers do tend to be over the top when it comes to self-confidence. It’s something to do with the absolute single-mindedness required to see something through from the mind’s eye to the drawing board to coming off the production line. Le Corbusier was no shrinking violet. Neither is Norman Foster. Phillippe Starck – while not ‘great’ – isn’t exactly encumbered by self-doubt, as we saw in his daft TV series. Ferdinand Porsche put the engine in the wrong end of a car and his descendents are still doing the same thing 60 years later.     

What is a bit worrying is the kind of culture in which Apple operates as a company. Because if it is the kind of place where nobody has the courage to tell the boss that a product doesn’t work properly before it is launched onto the market then they may well have more problems in store than a few dropped phone calls.
 

The Ofsted head's assertion that bad teachers are inevitable may be shocking, but you can't avoid incompetence.

The outgoing head of Ofsted, Zenna Atkins, has given an interview which has really succeeded in pushing the outrage button nationwide. The implication of what she said appears to be that we should simply accept that useless teachers exist in schools and they can even be of benefit to children who learn the vital social skill of how to deal with ineptitude by being taught by the incompetent.

What she actually said was this : ''I think it is inevitable that every school will at some point will have a useless teacher. If you look at any population of a workforce, there are people who are under-performing and that's often a significant percentage - up to 10% of people under-performing. It is inevitable, and it is not always a disaster, because children go to school to learn how to be in society. I don't think they should have a useless teacher, but I think at some point it is inevitable that they will have.''

Surely she’s right here. We all know someone – maybe more than one individual – who’s pretty useless whether we work in the private or public sector. But they carry on, being tolerated and carried by the rest of us. Too much trouble to do anything about… Too much risk of an ugly and costly tribunal hearing if we try to kick them out.

The argument is that in schools this isn’t good enough. Children’s lives could be blighted for good by bad teaching. There should be 'zero tolerance' of uselessness in our schools. It’s certainly an amazing statistic that a mere 18 teachers have been struck off for incompetence in the past 40 years, according to an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama. (One suspects many more have been forced to leave their posts without 'incompetence' being the official reason on the P45) Nevertheless, it’s estimated that around 17,000 teachers may not be up to the job.

Uselessness is everywhere. Do you really believe there aren’t any useless paediatric cardiac surgeons around the place? (There certainly were in Bristol.) Do you believe there isn’t a totally useless banker inside Goldman Sachs. (There may be dozens who aren’t socially useful but that’s another story.)  

I recall one particularly useless teacher at my school. Let’s call him Mr G. He was a pretty complex individual of about five feet two with a funny voice, Austin Powers teeth and a drink problem. His pedagogical ability was limited and he was a laughing stock, both among the boys and the staff. I can still see his tiny shoes now – no bigger than those of an eight year old. I recall one especially cruel incident when I was about twelve. In the classrooms we had those old-fashioned blackboards with 'rubbers' made of felt and wood to wipe off the chalk marks. Before one of Mr G’s lessons some boys attached the rubber to the wall at a point they knew would be just out of his reach, so he’d be unable to clean the board and thus unable to give the lesson. Hilarious.

Mr G left after a while, although I have no idea whether he was 'pushed' or not. God knows where he could have gone to for help in the British independent school system of the 1970s. His head, the NUT or Alcoholics Anonymous.  

I just Googled his name and found the following from the Evening Argus in Brighton from 2001. “ Police are appealing for anyone who knew a man found dead at his home to contact them. The body of R*** G****, 56, of Merewood Court, Carew Road, Eastbourne, was found on October 12. Police believe he may have been dead for some time. Coroner's officers are trying to build up a picture of his life and want anyone who knew him to contact them. Dentists have been urged to check if he was registered with them.” So he died alone – still probably useless - in a flat in Eastbourne. I for one, feel rather sorry about that and don’t feel he blighted my life. You could argue the 26 little savages he taught in class 2C of 1974 in fact contributed to blighting his. 

 Life is still good if you’re one of the wealthy elite.

‘Well here we go again…’ you could be forgiven for thinking. Happy Days have returned. Wine experts have agreed that the 2009 vintage is one of the finest in recent years, thanks to last year's perfect conditions of a wet spring and hot summer. The result of this classic marketing nonsense is that the newly released stuff from Bordeaux is going en primeur for seriously silly prices. Château Latour is £11,400 a case, Château Lafite-Rothschild is £13,500 a dozen, while Le Pin, a small vineyard in Pomerol, is on sale for £18,000. There are, apparently, no shortage of buyers for this nectar that cannot be consumed for at least ten years, although the vulgar City boys will be slinging it down their necks way before then.  

Happy days, indeed. The truth is for those individuals able to afford a grand for a bottle of wine things never really stopped. Ok, it was said after the darkest days of late 2008 that the mega-rich were laying low and merely doing the Pètrus in the comfort of their own Notting Hill and Monaco mansions. They were rolling in it before 2008 and still are. Little has changed for them.

Meanwhile us mere mortals are all entering the grim Age of Austerity. George Osborne is handing out hair shirts by the container-load which makes conditions ripe for yet another round of fat cattery protest. According to Incomes data Services bonuses for UK board directors at the largest companies rose by an average of 22.5% in the last six months. The average went up from £456,000 to £559,000. ‘After a period of relative austerity [note the word relative] the good times have returned to the UK boardroom,’ said Steve Tatton of IDS.

The truth is it’s always been miserable being poor and life won’t change there. But the new squeeze is on the middle class, as The Telegraph’s excellent and so-to-be-missed economics commentator Edmund Conway shows in this piece.

As Conway writes: ‘much of the extra cash generated during the boom years (and even after them) has been actively funnelled towards the most wealthy. The median wage in the US, adjusted for inflation, has been stagnant for pretty much three decades. But the figures at the high end of the scale have soared; whereas in 1970 the average US chief executive made $25 for every dollar of their typical employee's salary, today the figure is more like $90.’

The blessed Vince Cable, Business secretary – who must be well and truly pissed off that he’s been forced to trim £1bn from his departmental budget – is on the warpath. In an interview with the Times today he describes the excesses of executive pay as ‘socially unacceptable.’ But it’s hard to see what he can do about it. The rich are being squeezed a bit. The Treasury is already going to grab 50% of everything someone on £150K or over earns. CGT has been hiked. From next April if someone buys a house over £1m – and such purchases are made by many who are not super-rich – they will pay 5% in Stamp Duty. So that’s fifty grand and upwards.  

But the very wealthy do control our destinies. You can moan all you like about the big rewards handed out to the Tesco board but for all the laudable and painstaking efforts to get SMEs up and running in blighted spots such as Doncaster or Hull, just a single wave of Terry Leahy’s magic wand to conjure up a new store creates many more jobs than dozens of small businesses.

But it’s all about fairness, the likes of Polly Toynbee shout. Well, New Labour had a long hard go at fairness between 1997 and last May but it didn’t get very far. A very large amount of money was wasted trying to make things fairer. Unfortunately life often isn’t fair, although governments one should never give up trying to make it more so. But it’s a lot fairer in the UK than it is in Brazil or China or India. Maybe things are less fair than in Sweden or even Germany. But demonizing the creation of wealth isn’t going to help anyone.

Ocado publishes its IPO prospectus today. It could be brilliant but it's yet to make a profit.

I dread to think how much the Gwythers blow at Ocado during the course of a year. If we go on at this rate, the company will be in profit within months and you can all fill your boots with the shares and make a killing.

There are many arguments which have been put forward about why punters should steer clear of Ocado shares - the IPO prospectus for which is published today, though trading doesn't get underway until 21 July. Here is a smattering:

1. The outfit is run by a bunch of impatient, ex-Goldman wise guys. And Goldman folk always know something people who buy from them don’t.

2. Ocado doesn’t make a profit and may never do because it burns through massive piles of cash running such an expensive operation.

3. Ocado ain’t Amazon: food has far more hassle involved than books, CDs and electricals. And, anyway, Amazon is just a platform nowadays for many other retailers.

4. New Look, Merlin Entertainment and Travelport all pulled their floats when the market was less dodgily volatile than it is at the moment.

5. Waitrose now can (and will) expand its home delivery service - and why use an Ocado middleman?

6. Those banks which haven’t been bought off by a direct involvement in the sale are making clucking noises – a nice business, but only worth £500 million rather than the billion sought from investors according to non-conflicted Ambrian.

7. The online food market will never grow from its current 2.5% of the market to the 20% of electricals or books and anyway food retailing in the UK is a notoriously cut-throat business.

And yet, and yet, and yet… Ocado is a stunning brand and potentially a quite brilliant business.The South-East bourgeoisie – many of whom have received the seductive, exclusive email offering them shares as preferred customers - love it and so will the middle classes in the Midlands and the North when they can use it. If I ever have any cash kicking around looking for a home, these days the bank is giving me about 0.001% interest on it while inflation is up at 4% - maybe investing it in Ocado instead wouldn't be a bad idea.

The last two hundred quid’s worth of groceries arrived last night, delivered in the usual cheery fashion - although one pasta-based ready meal had been squashed. It was taken back with humble apologies. Indeed, if I never spent another minute of my life in supermarket queue behind some Muppet who can’t find the right change or vouchers, or who spends 10 minutes filling the bags, I’d be a happy guy. Our crappy local Sainsbury’s is such a miserable way to spend one’s time, I’ve said never again. Supermarket shopping is yesterday. The only way to trail round the god-forsaken aisles is on a computer.

Richard Lambert will be a tough act to follow. I think the CBI should go for a woman.

So, Richard Lambert is to stand down as the director-general of the CBi. Lambert has been a thoughtful and intelligent D-G -  just what was required as a stark contrast to that rabble-rousing tub-thumper Digby Jones (who had his own merits for the era in which he served). What has been impressive about Lambert is that he is nobody’s man. He says what he believes and has refused to toe the line, even with Peter Mandelson hissing at him.

Leading the CBI is a very important job, even at the best of times. But as we’re not really experiencing the best of times at the moment, getting the right successor is vitally important. The CBI, despite enduring so many brickbats from all directions, really is The Voice Of Business - and business has a vital role to play in the coming years. With the Department of Business Innovation and Skills all over the place, and probably about to suffer a budgetary butchering, the CBI will be in a hugely influential position.

Personally, I think it might be time that a woman ran the show. At times the CBI has been perceived by its knockers as a bit of an old boys' club. Appointing a woman would be a powerful rebuttal of that. And it seems to have worked for the French, who have a woman in the equivalent role - Laurence Parisot, who we profile in our current edition. I also think it would be a good idea to have an individual in the job who has experience of running an SME. It will be this tranche of UK business that gets us out of the mess in which we find ourselves. Parisot also came from small business: a family furniture company plus a market research outfit. (She also, incidentally performs her role at Medef for nothing - handy in the new Age of Austerity).

Elsewhere in the CBI, Helen Alexander is making way for Stephen Green of HSBC, a truly estimable individual, as the new President. Green is a bloke and corporations don’t get much bigger and grander than HSBC. So let’s find a smaller business woman for the D-G role. Who do you think should receive the head-hunters’ call? 

Capello's biggest managerial failing, and the paralysing fear of failure.

OK. We’re all feeling as bad as you are here. It almost ruined my weekend. But look at it this way: if we’d won, how agonising would it have been to see our helpless boys being toyed with by Messi, Tevez and co? So, by way of a mini-MT post-mortem, a few thoughts:   

1. I’m sure Capello’s art collection reveals he is a man of taste and culture. And I know he’s managed teams to success in the Champions League, plus the Italian and Spanish leagues. But when you manage a team of people, it is essential you can communicate clearly with them. Capello’s English remains poor. It may not take words that contain more than two syllables to get through to Wayne Rooney (one tap for yes, two taps for no, administered to the skull, has been known to work a treat).  But Wayne doesn’t speak any Italian, even if his wife is really accomplished at reading the names on Prada and Armani bags. If he is to stay, Capello needs a GCSE in English within the next six months.

2. On the subject of Rooney: how does a player of his ability, who was onto anything for his club last season, turn in four performances like that? What is going on inside his head? And what has Alex Ferguson got that Capello hasn’t? (And don’t say 'a hairdryer')  

3. The England team is also fearful of our dreadful tabloid press. A press that came out with some predictably moronic dross about the Germans before the game. The Star wittily went for: 'Bring it Hun!...we will fight jeering Jerries on the pitches'. Never mind that the German team contained a Turk, a Serbian, a couple of Poles and a Brazilian on the bench. The tired old lags at The Star are still fighting a war that ended 65 years ago, and means nothing to anything under the age of 40.

But the players read this nonsense, take heed of it and, in some instances, use the tabloids to score points over their manager. As soon as anything starts to go wrong, the unity is destroyed. As a result, England play with dread at the possibility of failure in their hearts. That isn’t the way to do it in sport, business or in families. There is no exuberance, no flair, no pleasure in performing well. Just terrible fear. And that’s a poor motivator. But never mind - they always have their eighty grand a week to fall back on.

Viacom shouldn’t have lost its $1bn law suit yesterday, but it was sadly inevitable. If I’d spent three years working on the latest Shrek or Toy Story movie only to find it up online and downloadable for free I’d be outraged. I’d be outraged because my next job as an animator depends not just on sales of Buzz Lightyear slippers and Donkey Happy Meals. And, of course, I’d be even more outraged if I was the studio owner who was in the hole to the tune of scores of millions of dollars and wanted to show the shareholders a return. Nicking these films is theft in the same way as the Brinks Mat bullion job or pilfering from the shelves at Oddbins is theft. But it’s a war that is lost and Viacom knows it. It has other battles to fight.

What’s also true is that snippets of ‘I like to move it’ sung by Sacha Baron Cohen in Madagascar and watched with wide-eyed wonder by my two year old on YouTube got him into such a bouncing frenzy that we had purchased the DVD within days. YouTube has its uses for film studios.

Quite apart from the morals of the argument, I think there’s something subtler amiss in the aesthetics of ‘something for nothing.’ Things are devalued if you don’t pay for them. They are disposable. You sling out that Primark shirt but not the Prada pants. A diamond is just a load of squashed carbon but their relative rarity, sparkle and a vigorous De Beers marketing campaign over many years have made them treasured. If you don’t pay a month’s salary for your girlfriend’s engagement ring, you’re a cheapskate.

The best of the animated features films of the last 75 years are our modern equivalent of Gothic cathedrals: they take an age to construct and are the product of huge team efforts of labour. One of the highlights of my career was interviewing the remaining old boys who made The Jungle Book. Such films are fascinating in that – although there is an original architect or director - there are the end result of a collective imagination. They are, in my opinion, the most marvellous of modern works of art of infinitely more interest and value than anything Hirst, Goddard or Fifty Cent. I want my two year old to continue to feel they’re special and be willing to pay twenty pounds to see them in a cinema when Ice Age 12 comes out in 2023.

I don’t want to come over all Nick Hornby on you but I do think 21st century Youth has lost something that people of our generation had when it comes to music. This loss is partly born of the fact that they don’t need to pay for it. When I went out as a kid to Smiths and paid my 79P for a T Rex single, took it home and played it to death on the music centre all weekend. And then repeated the exercise the following weekend. Now when their iPod or phone is filled to capacity with free tunes kids just delete a few and forget about them. Easy come, easy go.

Of course I’m just an old fart. Things have changed. The web has changed everything. (Just ask Alan Rusbridger who is fiddling on his iPad while the Rome that is Guardian Media group burns.) And I’m not saying kids have no taste or good sensibility. But the fundamental point remains the same that consumers have a different attitude towards something they’ve paid for. Something they’re invested money and emotion in.