It has taken Bernie Ecclestone two days to apologise for remarks he made praising Hitler as a man who could "get things done." That is probably quick by his standards. It probably was a struggle for him to sya the word 'sprry' at all, because this is a man accustomed to getting his way.
But the wording of the apology, while less offensive than the original, is still insensitive. He says that his remarks "upset a number of people in the Jewish community, Germany and elsewhere", as if Hitler is a sort of cultural taboo peculiar to certain national or religious groups. 
I happen to know that his remarks profoundly upset a friend of my mother who, as it happens, is not Jewish, German, or elsewhere, but she is old enough to have married her sweetheart before he went to war. He never came back. Nor did others of her relatives. She spent part of Saturday trying to ring The Times on the telephone to tell them how angry she was that they had published Eccleston'es remarks, but could not get through.
What is disturbing about Ecclestone's mindset, apart from the offense he caused, is that is an example of the increasingly fashionable view that democracy is a broken down system that has failed the British public. It simply is not true. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history or of world affairs will see that the general rule is that the most proposerous and efficienlty governed societies are democracies, and our democracy is one of the better ones. Dictatorship is wasteful as well as repressive. While Mugabe "gets thinsg done", Zimbabweans starve. But the British are like people who are born rich who have no sense of the value of money: We have enjoyed the freedom to vote and to speak for so long that we have forgottne how precious they are.

 

As every shopper will have noticed, it is difficult to find a reliable beast tamer or manure dealer in the modern shopping parade. But if you are curious to know what was on sale in your local high street 100 years ago, or more, it is worth a dip into the Ancestry website, where a vast collection of old business directories are available on line from tomorrow (Wednesday).

There you can discover what other shops there were in Liverpool in 1909, when Frank Woolworth opened Britain’s first Woolworth’s at 25-25A Church Street, starting a century in British retailing history that ended today.

Woolworth’s was something of a novelty because it was a general store buying in stock from a range of suppliers, instead of the normal family affair offering one specialised service or commodity for clients who knew what they wanted to buy before they left the house. Impulse buying and retail therapy were not common in those days.

The only name from Church Street, Liverpool, that has outlasted Woolworth’s is also the only other general store trading in 1909, namely The Bon Marche, who listed themselves simply as ‘merchants’.

The other shops along that street were all specialists. They were The Liverpool China & Indian Tea Co, Trainor Campbell - fancy drapers, Beresford & Co - brush manufacturers, Salmon & Gluckstein – tobacconists, Bennett John - coal merchants, Naylor Harry – hosiers, and The Standard Guano Co – manure store.

Other shops in the vicinity included Thomas Bennett & Co., a major manufacturer of casks and barrels based in Liverpool city centre. There was also a well known tailor’s shop, C. Sutherland, in North John Street, where you could buy a three piece suit for “just three guineas”, and Riley, J. & Co., a popular toy shop, and Hampshire, Hobbs & Co Ltd, the well known fish curers.

In other parts of the country, names that are familiar to us were already in the directory, though not always in the context that we expect. John Cadbury, for instance, is listed as a Tea Dealer, though he also sold groceries in his ship and, by the way, chocolate. In the 1840s, there was a grocery shop in Knightsbridge run by a former miller named Charles Henry Harrod. A century later, in Southend High Street, in  1937, a man named Charles Kalms set up a photographic studio, whose frontage was so narrow that the name Kalms & Co would not fit on the sign, so he called the shop Dixons instead. His son Stanley is now President of the huge conglomerate that owns Dixons, Curries, and PC World.

Winding back another century, and the shops listed on Church Street, Liverpool, in the 1790 edition of Gores Directory, are all specialists. They are William Crosdale - corn merchants, Ann Cross – victualler, Mary Daniel – apothecary, Johnson & Malaby’s – liquor vault, Thomas Binns – currier & leather cutter, Thomas Stelfox – sadler, John Thornley – hatter, and Charles Wilson – roper.

Nearby, there was also J Clarkson – beast tamer, George Clayton – gunsmith, Thomas Eyres – dealer in exotic substances, Sarah Knowles – Bacon Driers, and the Institute for Recovering Drowned Persons, which offered half a guinea for each body of a drowned person fished out of the water.

Olivier Van Calster, Managing Director of Ancestry.co.uk said: “This collection of directories is unique in that they cover 250 years of UK’s social and commercial history and include many famous names that can still be found on the high street today.

“Because the collection spans most of the UK, just about everyone will be able to discover something of relevance - whether it's what their ancestors were doing hundreds of years ago or how their hometown has changed across the centuries.”

You see some pretty silly behaviour in the House of Commons sometimes, but when Nick Clegg's attempt at a question was drowned in laughter at Prime Minister's Questions today, it really was primary school stuff.

He was struggling to make a serious point about tax credits, which he began by saying he had been visited by a single mother in his constituency. This of course is the politician who is misquoted as boasting that he has slept with 30 women. Actually, in his ill-fated GQ interview, Clegg brushed off a question about his sex life by saying that he had slept with "no more than 30" women - the kind of quip you might make in private conversation knowing that your listener understands that it is a jokey way of saying mind your own business.

Perhaps politicians just should not joke. When Clegg uttered the words 'single mother', cue uproarious laughter from all sides of the House of Commons, which Speaker Martin struggled to quell.

Grow up boys.

I am grateful to this blogger for helping with the impossible task of getting the size of the bailout of US banks into perspective. In real terms, the US could have bought Louisiana off Napoleon for 21 times the price they actually paid, and still pocketed some change. Or they could have fought the war in Vietnam nearly seven times, or sent nearly 20 manned missions to the moon.

Alternatively, for the same amount, assuming a parity of one dollar 51 cents to the pound, I calculate that you could buy The Independent at its current price of £1 every day excluding Sundays for just under 10 billion years.