That Gordon Brown lacks a sense of irony is now plain to see.

He's elevated Alan Sugar, a man whose catch-phrase is 'you're fired', to a peerage and to a position in his Government around the time he's about as sure of his post as any of the luckless souls that face Alan Sugar's TV tirade on the BBC's Apprentice.

That Gordon Brown is one with the gibbering contestants on a reality TV show is fairly obvious.

The Roman poet Horace said - and I translate liberally here: "Oh ship of state, why are you wandering so far from the shore rudderless?" - which is a pretty fair description of Brown.

In their heyday Brown and Blair were high-minded and claimed to have a direction. They had a vision for the UK and for technology.

Blair was going to educate, educate, educate and Brown was going to put the tools in place for that. We were going to have a UK high-tech industry that would rival that of Silicon Valley.

Brown set about this. Inspired by a document from Bank Boston called ‘the impact of innovation’, which pointed out that graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have founded 4,000 businesses that account for revenues of $232 bn, more than the gross domestic product of Thailand, Brown set about trying to achieve the same in the UK. He even called the head of MIT on the phone personally to sort it out.

The Brown initiative, set up as a private company called CMI, the Cambridge-MIT Institute, was to use £61.5m of Government money and £15m from the private sector to fund a five year exchange scheme between staff and students at Cambridge and MIT intended to break the mould of UK business.

This was to be our route to creating our own Bill Gates', for full details see (http://www.futureintelligence.co.uk/content/view/65/58/)

Great stuff. That was back in 2001. Where is UK Bill G? CMI appears to have vanished without a trace.

According to Mike Lynch, a man dubbed our own Bill G, but one whose rise at Autonomy predated CMI, he still would prefer people from Cambridge to MIT.

Perhaps so, but Autonomy is not Microsoft and Bill G went to Harvard anyway.

So what are we left with? Lord Alan Sugar, the man who made his reputation from cloning clones of IBM PCs. Hardly an innovator. His last gambit was the email answerphone. Nice try - good future thinking - you can get email on your mobile phone.

So Gordon no MIT programme for the high-tech entrepreneurs though we do have lots of research centres spread around the UK but no sense of overall direction - unless it is about to be delivered by the Lord Madelson in his enhanced role as busines and university supremo, for as long as he is in post.

Rudderless?

Gordon you're fired. For once you will make good TV.