So The Apprentice is finally over for another year, leaving posh boy Simon Ambrose to ride off into the sunset (well Brentwood) with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build a golf course in Essex.

Sneak only hopes he has a better experience than last year's winner Michelle Dewberry, who according to a recent interview with The Guardian got to see very little of Sir Alan’s famed business acumen.

"We were going to offer a service to a consumer so that if you have an old telly you pay us and we'll collect and recycle it," Dewberry reflected in the article. "Unfortunately we didn't make provision for the fact that consumers already get that service for free, or they will once a new regulation is implemented."

That would be the WEEE directive then, a piece of legislation that has been on the cards for a decade.

As Dewberry admits with studied understatement, the realisation that Sir Alan's new Xenon Green venture was set up to sell a service that people could get for free left her "in a bit of a predicament".

Far be it from Sneak to offer advice to a man who got out of the computer business just before the home PC revolution, but perhaps the next Apprentice series should see Sir Alan giving himself a due diligence refresher course.

21 Jun 2007