God alone knows what happened to the unfortunate Neil Heywood, the British businessman who appears to have got on the wrong side of the rich and powerful in China. How he met his end is too horrible to contemplate. William Hague has now been forced to deny that the dead man was a spy. Heywood, who was found dead in a mountain resort hotel room in the city of Chongqing on Nov 15, was apparently “only an occasional contact” of the British embassy in Beijing, “attending some meetings in connection with his business”. It would be interesting to know what precisely was discussed in those meetings but the whole business has the ring of a Le Carre novel set not in Berlin but the less romantic Chinese equivalent of 19th century Bolton.

Indeed the “colourful” Old Harrovian Heywood went one beyond Le Carre and cultivated an image straight out of Ian Fleming, driving a Jaguar with the numbers 007 included on the number plate and a Union Jack bumper sticker. Sadly the machine gun mounted in the front bumper and the ejector seat were not enough to save him.

One thing is for sure, the likelihood of ever getting to the bottom of what really happened is slight. The Chinese government controls the police and the judiciary and holds all the cards. The story will be spun as it sees fit. In China, justice is far less important that the maintenance of order and control.

I was following all this from Japan where I spent last week.  The place is a bit of a mess: deflation is back, Sony yet again delivered some ghastly figures, debt levels are terrifying, the population – still reeling from last year’s huge earthquake – is shrinking. Their long term problems look as hard to overcome as ever. One senior citizen with 40 years in Japanese business said to me: “We may have all sorts of issues but at least here for the most part we retain some sense of honesty, honour and decency in business. If we say we’ll do something we deliver.”

The Japanese look on the Chinese with disdain (the feeling is mutual) and this goes back many generations.  But he has a point. In China a contract can be often worthless. If you fall foul of a business or legal contract as a foreigner your chances of achieving any satisfaction from Chinese law is low. It’s fine if you wield the sort of muscle Apple does over Foxconn, but few Western companies have this degree of power and control. That is why so many Western commercial interests still choose to do business out of Hong Kong where they can seek comfort under the coat tails of a legal system installed by the British during the colonial era. It was far better for them than the opium we peddled way back when for which we have still not been entirely forgiven. China forges forward and one wishes it the best but it’s important to remember that it continues to lack many of the trappings of not only a civil but also a civilised society.

Talking of civilised… the United States, the land of the free.  I really do not like the attitude the States takes towards outsiders these days. Its stance towards the rest of the world has become increasingly unpleasant since 9/11. Anyone who has anything to do with US immigration in recent years will have seen the ugly face of a country we should admire. The individuals who present America’s face to the world are rude, surly and often thoroughly unpleasant. “Bring me your huddled masses.” That was the idea, guys. What went wrong?   Little wonder that commentator Fareed Zakira has written, “ Every visa officer today lives in fear that he will let in the next Mohhamed Atta, As a result, he is probably keeping out the next Bill Gates.” The rot has set in all over. The gruesome spectacle of the fight for the Republican candidacy was evidence enough of this dangerous closing of the American mind.

This intolerance becomes an acute hostility when the US is dealing with those whom it perceives as a threat.  Christopher Tappin’s case shows this very clearly. He is accused of selling batteries for military use to the Iranians. The way in which Mr Tappin has been treated – ten days in solitary in a New Mexico hell hole followed by a spell cooped up with a bunch of scalp-hungry Mescalero Apache Indians -  is no way to treat an OAP from Orpington. Disgraceful. It’s cruel and unusual punishment, and he hasn’t even been convicted of anything yet. It’s as if the Americans have taken a leaf out of the Chinese Communist Party’s Little Red Book on Arbitrary Justice.

This is the last blog you’ll be getting from me for a month or so. I’m off on a short sabbatical to help Michael Woodford, the Olympus whistleblower, write a book about his life over the last year. His experience is less le Carre and Fleming more John Grisham. See you again in June.

My colleague’s 72 year old mum in response to yesterday’s budget said something along the lines of this. ‘I feel so sorry for kids these days. There are no jobs, they are loaded up with university debt because the government doesn’t give them anything any more. And what do I do? I sit here with all these free things being thrown at me – winter fuel allowance, free TV licence, free bus pass, subsidised computer courses.’

She’s never had it so good and George Osborne is quite right to give her a little squeeze. In an ideal world benefits for the elderly would be means tested but the cost of that would defeat the purpose. It is not the raison d’être of the state to be handing out bundles of twenties to couples in their 60s living in million pound houses in Orpington when they aren’t staying at their estancia in Granada.

The classically British image of the elderly is of a sad old dear sitting alone by her electric fire which she is too poor to switch on. It’s very durable and hard to revise. The BBC Newsroom’s Rolodex is filled with ten of thousands of them ready to look anguished and frail when the telly crew turns up.

This isn’t the way things often are. Just ask those guys and gals down at Saga who are coining in the grey pounds. I’ll admit that when age is combined with infirmity which requires care at home things are not so rosy. We don’t look after the sick old very well in the UK and the advent of widespread senile dementia is going to be little short of calamitous.

It’s the elderly who have mugged my generation and for the coming Y plus Gen Z things are going to be even more dire as the oldsters demand we replace their knees, hips and fit Stannah stair lifts into their mansions. By the time I get to 67 the retirement age goalpost will have been shifted yet again. I’ll still be here banging out this stuff when I’m eighty plus. We’ll be back to the old days when you got two to five years on retirement in before you snuffed it.

So the well off old should quit whinging and count their blessings. They wouldn’t wish to be entering the world of adulthood in 2012.

So the latest holder of the white hot seat at Stamford Bridge has been ejected from his dug out, to emerge blinking into the cold light of day on the King’s Road clutching his P45. Chelsea’s owner Mister Abramovitch – everyone with more than two o-levels or ten million offshore in British football is “mister”, it’s all a bit weirdly Uriah Heep like that – has now got through eight managers in the same number of years.

Someone asked me yesterday if business had anything to learn from football’s methods of conducting itself. The answer is I sincerely hope not. UK football is a busted flush and the game is about to start unravelling. Rangers going into administration is only the beginning. The Glasgow club is the Lehman Bros of UK footie.  Sixteen out of the top twenty clubs in the Premiership made a loss last year. Manchester City went one better: their player wage bill is 106% of their turnover. Even a lowly convenience store owner will tell you that that is no way to run a business.

The trouble in football is that managers cannot manage. It’s the players who are in charge having taken over the asylum some time back. They combine with the owners who, having made their vanity purchase of their trophy asset, do love to get involved. As a player when you’re on a cast iron contract and one hundred and fifty grand a week you don’t take to being pushed around and told what to do by your boss. Even if he asks nicely. Outside a primary school classroom we’ve rarely seen cupidity and petulance like that displayed by Carlos Tevez and his cohort of advisors.  And engagement, that subject beloved of HR departments? Are you kidding? They may kiss that badge on their chests if they put one in the back of the old onion bag but if an offer comes in on Monday morning via their agent which offers more loot…loyalty schmoyalty. Even top ranking investment bankers have a deeper sense of ethics and decency.

Mind you the managers aren’t that much more impressive. You either motivate by using the hair drier system, kicking the odd adidas boot into David Beckham’s face or you do it The ‘arry Redknapp Method, whatever that is. It says something about the state of our national game that we’re desperate to appoint as England coach an individual who glories when in the dock in having the reading and writing age of a two year old. Thank god he’s better at Maths.

I love football because it remains ostensibly a game. Or at least is suppose to be. Games depend on chance. This is yet another way in which it is not like business, where you tend to believe that you pull levers to produce a desired , predicted effect. (Or at least you hope you do.) No, football is a game of two halves, filled with uncertainty and frustration which clearly irks Abramovich. He can buy 557 feet yachts until the cows come home but he just can’t get the consistent glory he desires however much money he chucks at it. It’s an itch he just can’t scratch, poor man.  Maybe, if he’d like to take part in a more certain game to derive his kicks, one where the result can be predicted, he should join his friend Vladimir Putin and enter Russian politics.

I spoke a couple of days ago to a senior executive in the United States from within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. As I told him the tale of Rebekah Brooks and the police horse his eyes grew wider and wider. But when he thought about it he didn’t appear that surprised. Nothing coming out of the tabloid world of Wapping surprises anybody any more. The fun and games are well and truly over.

So now James Murdoch has been stripped of the Chairmanship of News International and is being run out of town. My guess would be that he’ll be out of his chair at Sky as well by the end of the year. With the talk of rehabilitating his brother Lachlan, it appears to be a humiliating end for James. With Rupert now aged 81 his succession planning is in tatters.

Many rejoice at this. The depth of vitriol directed towards the Murdochs defies belief. It is fuelled by many on the Left who will never forgive him for what he did to Neil Kinnock. Now we have the grim, leaden spectacle of the Leveson Inquiry, the outcome of which is likely to be negative for those decent, honest, hard-working journalists – yes, we do exist – who keep you the Great British Public and our politicians honest.

What happened at the Sun and the News of the World was pretty awful. Low, shameful and never to be excused. The law will run its course and if people broke it they may well go to prison. The scale of the police inquiry into phone hacking is quite ludicrous but maybe not surprising (as nobody knows better than the Met, the extent to which its behaviour over the years – when it comes to tabloid hacks – was very dodgy indeed).

The phone hacking scandal is appalling but nobody died. Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times,  an employee of Murdoch’s, did die in Homs last week. She was an outstanding, brave reporter who gave up her life so that the truth about vile regimes and brutal armies all over the world could be exposed. Murdoch also loses one million pounds a week on the Times. I feel this country would be a far lesser place if the Times were owned by Richard Desmond or a Russian oligarch. I would also rather it was owned by Murdoch than by Rothermere because I believe the Daily Mail is one of the British institutions, like our weather and Abu Quatd, with which I would happily dispose.

I also strongly approve of the way in which Murdoch appears to be one of the last media barons left to stand up for content. His Tweets, and the fact he’s doing them, are admirable. And, while we’re on the subject of new media….

It’s also striking that, whilst a great deal of sound and fury is being generated by the Leveson enquiry, fuelled as already suggested largely by those with old scores to settle, many a blind eye has been turned to other egregious invasions of privacy. Only last week we heard how companies including Apple and Facebook are apparently rifling through the swathes of personal info on our phones and reporting back to HQ on everything from our shopping habits to what we like to email and text about.  The source? Mobile phone apps with sneaky T&C’s which no-one, of course, ever bothers to read.

The Chinese government is, if rumours are to be believed, busily compiling vast virtual dossiers on just about everyone with access to the internet. No doubt US and even our own security services – amongst others – are doing the same. Such automated snooping has the potential to affect millions of us, compared to tens or perhaps hundreds whose phones have been hacked by those misguided hacks. And yet I suspect we’ll be waiting a long time for a public enquiry into that one.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I love more of an evening, when the kids have finally collapsed and I’ve made it back downstairs to sit down, than kicking back with a glass of red to watch one of the titans of the Premiership get humiliated in Europe.

I adore watching football on telly. This may be because I could never play that well myself. My late father turned up to watch me in the school 4ths, aged 11, and remarked afterwards that I was the first midfielder he’d ever seen who jumped up to head a ball when it was a full forty feet away. The reason it’s so compelling is it remains one of the few genuinely dramatic things on the box. (One is never entirely sure, these days,  if the result of the latest one day cricket international has been pre-ordained by a betting syndicate in Doha or Lahore.)

With football you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen next. Who will be the next oaf to mouth a racially abusive epithet? Can that forward get into the penalty area before hitting the deck, writhing in agony, as if felled by a volley of fire from a Gatling gun?

Football is the real drama deal unlike the host of lousy reality/property nonsense on Channel 4 with its faux jeopardy. Will Ken and Tina, the hopeful couple on  ‘Location Location Location’ have their offer accepted on their wow-factored, pebble-dashed dream home in Surbiton?   Who gives a monkey’s?

It’s great to watch but something is very rotten in the state of British football.  You don’t have to have followed the wretched tale of how Harry Redknapp conducted his business affairs to get a strong sense that football does not appear to adhere to the same rules of business as the rest of us.

Now the “proud” Ibrox club, Glasgow Rangers, has entered administration on Tuesday after HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) pursued legal action at the Court of Session in Edinburgh over alleged unpaid VAT and PAYE totalling about £9m. Maddened, spit-flecked fans threatened to lynch the owners. ( It’s only a game, boys. Possibly the most moronic quote ever to emanate from football was Shankley’s pious  ‘Football isn’t a matter of life and death – it’s far more important than that.’ Sorry, Bill. It isn’t and wasn’t. It’s entertainment. Ken Dodd on grass over 90 minutes.)

Now the heat is on. The  Treasury’s coffers are near bare. The party is over. HMRC is getting nasty and is quite willing to force more of these  clubs into administration. Quite right. When I think about the unholy stink made about Stephen Hester’s £1 million bonus then I consider that hideous mess into which Glasgow Rangers descended this week, I do wonder.

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Rangers are also awaiting the outcome of a tax tribunal over a disputed bill, plus penalties, totalling £49m. Club chairman Craig Whyte, who took control of the club from Sir David Murray in May of last year, has said this potential liability to HMRC could reach up to £75m if the club lost the tribunal. How have they been allowed to get away with this?

What appears clear is that a good number of clubs in recent years have used an emotional blackmail on the revenue – that they were so vital to the fabric of their local communities that they needed to be excused actually handing over the income tax and national insurance from their players’ massive pay packets. All pretty stinky.

The question is now – has Rangers put contagion into the air? AT  Kearney is putting the boot in with some very worrying predictions. ‘In 2010, we warned of the similarities between football and banking asking whether football was too popular to fail. The financial woes of Rangers seem to confirm they mirror in many ways. The question is now: is Rangers the Lehman Brothers of football?’ Harry Redknapp as Dick Fauld. I wonder if the latter claims he was hindered in his business dealings by having a reading age of a two year old.

In both football and banking, managers have lost the power to manage. The talent argument has been used to enable the lunatics – in this case the rain-making bankers and players on £175,000 per week – to take over the asylum. The bosses are held to ransom – ‘reward me with unimaginable amounts of money or I walk.’ This is an unsustainable way to carry on.

So the Mob has got its way and is currently parading Stephen Hester’s head around the City on the end of a pikestaff. Metaphorically speaking. (To a banker his bonus is as vital as his head.) What this whole disturbing episode shows, yet again, is the disaster that often comes to pass when business and politics meet.  Hester is the one banker who has been beheaded because he was the one individual that government – urged on by the mob – could most easily humiliate and cut down to size. He is, after all, a government employee of sorts.

Except, of course, a civil servant he isn’t. You simply cannot run a bank – especially one which has a substantial investment bank included – as a public sector enterprise. RBS isn’t the NHS or English Heritage and never can be. It’s a nonsense.  The worse things get at RBS and the more politicians become involved in its operation the more likely it is we will never get our money back.  One thing is for sure – we may not have much confidence in the ability of politicians to run the country but their ability to run a bank is even more questionable.

A couple of other thoughts: how motivated would you feel today as you arrived at your desk if you were Stephen Hester? Would you be 100% fired up to give your all on behalf of the organisation and therefore the UK tax payer? How he must now feel about his decision to ‘help out’ by joining a bankrupt bank. I can just imagine the conversation with Gordon Brown’s people: ‘Great sense of duty… blah blah blah…  definite seat in the House of Lords… blah blah. Do the right thing.’ Well Hester has paid the penalty for being seduced. Who could blame him if he walks out? And the quality of the list of individuals to replace him will be pretty poor.

What this has done is ram home – if it wasn’t already glaringly obvious – that the majority of the UK population now loathes bankers with a passion and will do whatever it can to make their lives hard and indeed even bring them down. Well, fine.  Let’s chase them all out of town and see where that gets us. This morning, RBS shares were down to 27p, almost half the price the taxpayer paid for them in 2009 – a loss of £300m.  Public anger about high pay may be understandable but zeroing in on Hester will ultimately solve nothing.

So we come to the end of yet another desperate week of teeth-gnashing, snarling and outrage about money. People either receiving or not receiving their just desserts. A cap of £26, 000 on benefit-receiving families, Stephen Hester and his just-shy-of-a-million bonus. As we edge towards the gyre, the national mood gets uglier and uglier.

There is now so much political capital to be made from banker’s bonuses, so much to be gained from whipping up the mob, that we risk losing all sense of reason on this matter. Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: “A bonus of nearly a million pounds looks to ordinary people like he [Hester] has won the lottery – with a ticket they paid for.” So what is Mr Kenny advocating? That all 57 million of us share Hester’s bonus. Typical that Kenny should think Hester’s earnings are a merely a matter of luck.

Bankers, with their parallel universe of money-grubbing selfishness that has landed the lot of us in the stuck, make me as cross as any normal human. But we have got £45 billion of our hard-earned cash tied up in RBS. People seem to find it impossible to accept that we, as taxpayers, want, indeed desperately need, the bank to do well. Do you think for one second that any Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley smart guy – who is currently collecting a bonus well in excess of a million – would want to go anywhere near the hot seat at RBS? To be pilloried in The Daily Mail, spat at in the street, have his kids bullied school? It’s a tough, nasty job and Hester appears to be making a reasonable fist of it. He has a top-notch CV and could easily earn a lot more money, and garner a lot less public outrage, elsewhere.

Hester is not Fred Goodwin. He’s trying to clear up Goodwin’s wreck. And he didn’t have to do it. There were far easier ways out there to make a living and he is already a wealthy man. But he is not a charity. We own 84% of this company and, in the long run, we want out. So we need a leader to do a decent job and turn the thing around. If it’s true that both Hester and his board would have walked if the bonus was not forthcoming then that would have left the bank, and us, in an even sorrier state.

Wherever Stephen Hester will enjoy his supper tonight, I’m glad I’m not him. It cannot be pleasant at the moment, million bonus or no million bonus.

Call me perverse but I find myself more taxed by the operatives of the Docklands Light Railway who have blackmailed their pusillanimous managers into giving them each a £2500 bonus during the Olympics, simply for turning up for work rather than throwing a sickie. Sorry but isn’t it their job to pilot those trains whether there is an Olympics on or not? Note that DLR trains are fully automated so in theory they don’t even need operators on board. I won’t even bother asking the rhetorical question about any degree of pride in what they do.

Meanwhile, in other news….Barclays have just announced that worldwide they received 107,000 applications for jobs from graduates last year. This would appear to show there are plenty of young people out there who wish to become mini Diamonds and Hesters. Their career paths are likely to be bumpy, and dinner party conversations about what they do for a living testy, for some time to come. If that doesn’t put them off, what right does anyone else have to try to do so?

This morning at 4.28 I was, as is frequently the case, woken by the first lumbering large Boeing or Airbus coming in from the Far East to land at Heathrow. The siting of an airport to the West of the City it serves when the prevailing wind is from the South West was a very dim idea indeed. But, as Heathrow dates back to the pre-jet era, nobody thought about this and the resulting sleep-disturbance it causes to millions is no laughing matter. Equally unamusing are the appalling levels of air pollution that exist at Heathrow.

Even if it was in the correct place, Heathrow is full. It operates at 98% capacity which means, as occurred last Winter, when we get a bit of snow all hell breaks lose and we become the air transport laughing stock of Europe. Gatwick has only one runway and is not a proper business airport. Stansted is a Ryanair ghetto miles from London with the slowest and most useless train link outside Afghanistan . Luton… Well, don’t get me started.

So we require a new airport and the Thames estuary is clearly the place for it.  The announcement this morning that the government is willing to do some research to consider it as a possibility is a good start. But there is a long long way to go. Where to stick a new alternative to Heathrow is an argument that has been going on for decades and I’m old enough to recall the fight against it being placed on Maplin Sands, an earlier version of Boris Island. It was the twitchers who were in the vanguard of the protest movement against that idea, as they will be this time round.

The infrastructure necessary to bring hundreds of thousands of passengers into central London each day from the estuary will be very expensive indeed. But building it will be a great economic stimulus and create huge numbers of jobs. By contrast if  we don’t do something fast we are in grave danger of being left behind as rivals in Holland and Germany eagerly suck air passenger traffic away from us. A recent GLA report shows that airline passenger demand is forecast to increase from 140 million to 400 million by 2050. We cannot just sit there and watch as everything clogs up to the point of standstill.

We’re supposed to be an outward-facing trading nation. Stuff doesn’t arrive on ships any more. People arrive on planes and gliding down to touch a runway in the Thames, our most ancient commercial waterway, is very apt.

So we’ve made it to the Midwinter solstice. Let’s hope the darkest hour really is before the dawn. We always bend over backwards to put on a cheery face here at MT but however hard you try to shine the turd, this has been a fairly rum old year for UK PLC.

We tottered along during most of the first eleven months hoping for some rays of light but as the year drew to a close we’ve had the morale-sapping double whammy of a gloomy prognosis from the Chancellor and the Office for Budget Responsibility plus the Euro Summit debacle.  In this unedifying Brussels all-nighter,  we appear, yet again, to have been labelled the Doctor Evil of Europe intent on bringing our neighbours to their knees. (Not that they haven’t made a pretty good job as getting down there in the first place.)

I have no real sense of where the euro horror story is going to go next. The possible endgames are either bad, really bad or 1930s bad.  It has degenerated into a deadly game of politicians versus the markets and the markets are currently winning, although they will be the ones that suffer if the whole eurozone house of cards falls over with the failure of another bank. God forbid. You’d have to read through the equivalent European version of ‘Too Big To Fail’ all over again.

Currently I am equally concerned at the effect on national morale. It is setting us against each other and bringing out some deep-seated resentments about wealth inequality that were always bubbling away near the surface during the Noughties.  You could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve all drifted off, gone into a time warp and landed back in Dickensian times. Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Future.

On the one hand the front pages this morning remind us of how Goldman Sachs has been allowed a ‘sweetheart deal’ to enable it to skip a tax bill of anything up to £20m. This after it spent years resisting coming to a settlement with the revenue as its lawyers tried every trick in the book to stall. The fuss has been enough to cost the head of HMRC his job.

On the other we have the bizarre story of Pauline Ford aged 58 from Plymouth. She  is a schizophrenic women living in a broken down caravan who saved some of her benefits as a nest-egg for her old age only now to be convicted of benefit fraud. Her defence counsel pointed out in mitigation that had she actually gone out and blown the cash on a 50 inch plasma screen telly or indeed just a few more cans of beans each week she would have committed no offence. Rules is rules and she has been forced to repay more than £28,000 and received a suspended prison sentence.

If we don’t turn our economy around soon, every time news like Goldman Sachs and Pauline Ford sit on the same page we will witness a deeper and deeper sense of resentment. It’s a corrosive cynicism that will eventually threaten our social fabric. Many would claim this is pretty well upon us already and cite the Summer’s riots as an example.  (I don’t buy this, by the way, and some of the GCSE Sociology Grade C nonsense that has been spouted about their cause is pretty dismal in its reasoning.) But the global anti-capitalist protests reflect a sense that the markets aren’t working. Or maybe they are and being subject to an especially vigorous phase of Schumpeter’s ‘perennial gale of creative destruction.’ Either way it’s an unpleasant experience for many until the sun comes out again.

Anyway, have a peaceful and happy break. See you again in the New Year.

There’s no denying these are tough old times. One is hard-pressed to find many good news stories on the businesses pages as the year closes. All the more reason to emit plenty of cheers and whoops for those companies who’ve done well in our annual Most Admired companies survey which we celebrated at Claridge’s last night. It is easy to forget, with all the sound and fury of an imploding Eurozone, that many British business do continue to do well. Our surprise overall winner this year Berkeley is one of them.

Confidence is absolutely vital for business to take place. If you are numbed with anxiety and just stuffing your available cash into the mattress you are likely to be in no mood to take even the smallest risk. The current funk caused by the grim news from George Osborne earlier this week has the danger of becoming paralysing.

A pat on the back for individuals and organisations should never be under-estimated at the best of times. When things are not going that well, the need for encouragement and the celebration of successes is even more vital. With knock-backs frequent, the morale levels in UK business are not high and every little bit of praise and spirit-lifting counts, helping organisations pull together. It doesn’t take much to say, “Well done.”

Howard Davies, the MT columnist, who gave the after dinner speech last night made an important point. Growth may be painfully slow at the moment in the UK but there is a still a large existing cake to be fought over. Our economy is big and there remains much opportunity in there.

Berkeley is the smallest company ever to take the MT title, the first builder and the first company still chaired by it founder. I first met its remarkable creator and Chairman Tony Pidgley nearly a decade ago and he made a proper impression. Pidgley is a classic entrepreneur: an adopted child, he struggled with reading and writing at school, leaving to cut logs and drive a truck. He understands numbers and the last tenth of one per cent of his margins on the flats and houses he builds. His judgement of the ebbs and flows of the property market has been little short of impeccable.

They don’t make them like Pidgley any more which is shame. All he needs to do now to ensure his legacy is create something as enduringly beautiful as St Pauls or Hampton Court along the Thames riverbank which he has dominated for the last twenty years.