A whiff of desperation surrounds Gordon Brown’s appointment of businessman and television celebrity Sir Alan Sugar as “enterprise tsar”. What was the calculation? That hiring the charismatic star of the business-themed game show The Apprentice would bolster Mr Brown’s ebbing appeal? That giving the UK’s best-known tellypreneur an ill-defined, non-ministerial role would compensate for losing four cabinet ministers in 24 hours?

One suspects that government strategists are being driven not just by events, but by what they watched on television the night before. The announcement that the Sage of Chigwell was joining Team Brown was readied last Thursday following an episode of The Apprentice. God help us if a screening of The X-Factor ever precedes a reshuffle. Cheryl Cole could end up as home secretary.