If you say you are deserting your club for another they

If you say you are deserting your club for another, they will take you to task. And because we fans give our unconditional love to our clubs, we expect the same back. We think our heroes should show loyalty, and stay with the club come hell or high water.Yet players like Rio Ferdinand may have only a few years at the top of their game, and why shouldn’t they try and get the best money they can, even if it is an astonishing £120,000 a week? At work, we want our bosses to pay us as much as we are worth. Only our negotiations are not carried out on the back pages of the tabloids If someone offers us a better job, we might accept. It is the same for footballers, however proprietorial we may feel about them.The directors and shareholders in football clubs tend to get the worst of the fans’ ire If things go badly, fans call for the chairman to be sacked.

If the club down the road buys a star player, fans demand the board gets out its chequebook to buy a better one.For every Sir John Hall, Martin Edwards or Ken Bates who have made money out of football clubs, for every Roman Abramovich or Jack Walker who have bought success, there are 50 or 100 chairmen who have ploughed a large part of their life savings into their local clubs for little reward. If Malcolm Glazer wants to spend £790m buying Manchester United, fans should not attack him, they should welcome him Or maybe even pity him.. The Conservatives should be afraid Very afraid. The Prime Minister was almost skittish at his news conference on Thursday. Did he look exhausted, humiliated, chastened? Did the journalists sense blood and go for the kill? No. It turned out to be as challenging an engagement as cutting the ribbon on a new nursery – sorry, I mean, a new wraparound educare facility.

The media pundits had solemnly informed the nation on 6 May that there was only one question facing the re-elected Tony Blair: when will you go? Yet when the delegates of the fourth estate gathered under the chandeliers at 10 Downing Street, only one of them asked the question. “But he is a good example of an appointment that didn’t work because of the shock he encountered when he arrived in this complex world – with its Sir Humphreys, accountability and all these things that make it so different from the boardroom.”Put simply, the City does not equip people for life in Westminster.Mr Norman, for example, does not regret his time as a MP but adds: “In politics, everyone’s an entrepreneur Team working is not a big part of it. I’m impatient go back to a world where I can have an impact.”Battles held in the privacy of the boardroom are one thing; the public war in Parliament is quite different. There, only the shrewdest political operators will succeed – and leading a FTSE 100 giant or making millions is irrelevant Lord Drayson, take note.. Paul Lester is a driven man. The chief executive of shipbuilder and government services company VT Group is a West Bromwich Albion fanatic.

The 55-year-old tries to attend all the club’s home games and has only missed one match – when the “Baggies” moved a fixture to a Friday night, clashing with a pre-arranged dinner for VT board members and their wives

Paul Lester is a driven man. So to watch his team play at their West Midlands home takes a 400-mile round trip.Today Lester, who was brought up in Warwickshire, will watch West Brom play their final match of the season and quite possibly fall out of the Premier League. The match will have further significance for Lester because the opposition will be Portsmouth, the team supported by most workers in VT’s naval base and shipyards on the South Coast.Whatever the result, Lester will not have time to dwell on football tomorrow, because he will spend the day putting the finishing touches to the company’s year-end results. And this should give him something to smile about even if his team lets him down: house broker ABN Amro is predicting a rise in pre-tax profits to £41m on revenues of £602m.It will be an endorsement of the new course on which Lester put VT when he arrived three years ago. Formerly known as Vosper Thornycroft, the company is one of Britain’s oldest warship builders.

Today, though, under Lester’s stewardship, shipbuilding only accounts for 17 per cent of VT’s earnings, with most coming from government outsourcing contracts.”A lot of effort has been put in to develop support services. The very reason for this was to offset the decline in shipbuilding,” says Lester.Most of VT’s services work is in defence. Notably, it has a 10 per cent stake in AirTanker, the EADS-led consortium that has been selected to provide and service a fleet of air-to-air refuelling jets for the Royal Air Force, under a £13bn Private Finance Initiative contract.Lester is now eyeing new opportunities in the education sector: “The biggest potential is in Building Schools for the Future – the refurbishment and new build of all secondary schools in the country That is 240 schools a year – a massive programme. Maude is not a leadership contender, but he is an ideologue of modernisation And the modernisers are right about many things. He promoted George Osborne and David Cameron, the 30-something standard bearers of the moderniser cause, and appointed Francis Maude party chairman, in charge of drawing up the rules of the leadership contest.