• Did the failure of England’s footballers have a message for business? Vince Cable said no, arguing that Fabio Capello’s salary did not provoke the same outrage as Fred Goodwin’s because the England team had not been rescued by the State. Then the aptly named CEO of Greene King, Rooney Anand, pointed out that Germany’s strategy had been ten years in the making while England thought a highly-paid manager guaranteed success Sir David Nicholson, chief executive of the NHS, reported that the Darwinians of the public services task force had suggested that public services should be allowed to fail. Sink schools down a plughole? Imploding hospitals? Brave, as Sir Humphrey would have said in Yes, Minister.George Osborne was quick to joke about his frugality, contrasting the array of world leaders’ jets waiting on the tarmac at the G20 in Toronto with “our charter plane”. He may have forgotten however, that the plane (an Airbus A340-600, above,) was provided by Virgin, whose CEO, Steve Ridgway, shouted out that it was “a very nice charter plane” Apparently it was an Airbus A340-600, one of the most modern passenger aircraft, and significantly newer than Air Force One.
• Lord Browne broke his silence yesterday on the crisis engulfing his successor at BP, Tony Hayward. “You need to over-react as much as you possibly can to something that might be big and obviously has become so,” he advised. And had Mr Hayward — who initially described the impact of the spill as “very, very modest” done so? That was up to others to judge, Lord Browne said. Very diplomatic.
• Jean Chrétien, the former Prime Minister of Canada, told us how he slashed a huge deficit in the 1990s.How did he begin this Herculean task?“I cut the budget for my wife the first morning,” he said. Worrying news for Sam Cam. But cheery news for taxmen. Mr Chrétien explained that almost nowhere in government was safe from cuts. But there was an exception. “The department that collects taxes. I increased their budget.”It may have been sweltering yesterday, but do we really want to picture Britain’s top business talent in their swimming trunks? Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls Royce, certainly did. He told the summit: “As Warren Buffett recently said,‘When the tide goes out we find out who has got their swimming trunks on’. It is an important question for us: where are my swimming trunks?” Fortunately, he did not demonstrate the answer.