One of the best-qualified candidates to become the government's chief scourge of red tape is not even on the long list. Edward Atkin, a respected private entrepreneur, is negotiating to sell his business, Cannon Avent, the maker of baby bottles, partly in fury at mounting business regulation. But when he applied to chair the Better Regulation Executive - a kind of Spanish Inquisition to root out pettifogging law - Mr Atkin says headhunters "told me the people making the appointment did not want anyone who might make life difficult for them".

Business is rightly cynical about the characteristically complex deregulatory programme that Gordon Brown, chancellor, announced this week, of which the BRE is a component. Would it have been so hard to promise simply to make less law? "There is a huge contradiction in planning to cut red tape a week after you have announced the biggest legislative programme of any parliament," says Stephen Alambritis of the Federation of Small Business.