It’s too easy to criticise The Apprentice. The show is pitched as the world’s toughest job interview, in which our brightest and best young business minds compete for a £100k job by demonstrating their superior managerial skills, financial acumen and commercial savvy. But despite the sombre music and dramatic shots of The City of London’s office blocks, the show isn’t really that much different from the benchmark of low-rent reality television, Big Brother.
Ultimately it’s a game-show in which a group of shrieking, self obsessed arses are thrown together and forced …

It must have come as a great relief to ‘special relationship’ watchers in the UK that Barack Obama chose Gordon Brown as the first European leader to ring when he assumed office (albeit well after his calls to leaders on other continents). The news that Obama’s Kenyan grandfather had been tortured by the British during the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising during the 1950s had sent them into paroxysms of worry that the US might dump Britain as its special European friend, in favour of the less loaded embrace of France …