George Osborne is having a good run. The tears he shed at Baroness Thatcher's funeral showed us there is a heart beating beneath that hair-shirt.

Listening to Philip Clarke, Tesco's chief executive, explaining on radio last week why the supermarket giant has just reported the first fall in profit in two decades left me feeling distinctly queasy.

Lord Heseltine's comments last week suggesting that the British may be too wealthy to push for economic recovery have predictably caused a flutter, especially in the blogosphere, where Tarzan is now being accused of being an uncaring rich Tory toff who doesn't give a toss about the poor.

Whatever you think of the beehive-haired singing trio who star in the Sheila's Wheels pink Cadillac or the fictional Italian singer in Gio Compario, you've got admit that the insurance tycoon behind them, Peter Wood, is little short of a genius.

Simon Fox, the chief executive of Trinity Mirror, should have known better than to go to ground over the allegations of phone-hacking at his newspapers.

Here's what John Spedan Lewis had to say in a BBC radio broadcast in the 1950s as he explained why he had given the family company to the staff: "The present state of affairs is really a perversion of the proper working of capitalism. It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums.