I am not into Eastern mysticism, but I find myself fretting over the architectural karma that will effuse from the walls of The Grove country house hotel in Watford if it is picked to stage the follow-up next spring to the emergency G20 summit. Far from sorting out the world's economic problems there, I fear there is a risk that Messrs Obama, Brown and the others might flip and reorganise the global economy along the lines of British Rail.

My own experience of the Grove was in 1985 during its earlier incarnation as BR's management training centre, when what had been Lord Clarendon's drawing room was a smoky bar, and his croquet lawn was built over with prefabricated lecture rooms. Harvard Business School it wasn't. When I arrived for a week's course as an engineering trainee, the director of studies was quite open that some BR top brass were unconvinced by management training. “They think we spend our time here sitting in circles, holding hands and chanting,” he said.

If only. What followed was a week of seminars presented by functionaries clearly struggling with the concept that they were running a business, not a job club for them and their mates. Too many passengers were using some services, the man from InterCity told us, so we are going to jack up the cost of tickets to discourage them. Can't you invest in more rolling stock and try to expand the business? I asked. No, he said: that wasn't part of BR's remit.

At least pricing paying passengers off the railways meant more room for BR's own executives to stretch their legs. The one statistic I never forgot was that one in twelve first-class passengers at the time was one of BR's own staff on a junket.

The man from Regional Railways then came along to explain how to justify the closure of branch lines and the reducing of main lines to single track (many of which have since had to be returned to double track to cope with rising passenger numbers after privatisation). Yet funnily enough, while happy to propose reducing public service, I don't recall a single speaker suggesting a reduction in overmanning - for example by eliminating the rule that any train travelling at more than 100mph had to have two drivers.

Now that bankers and hedge fund managers are in the dock, it is easy to forget how nationalised industries ruined the economy. But with Gordon Brown out to convince the world that we need another state-led Keynesian spending splurge, we would do well to recall what happened last time the State took it upon itself to run industry. The Grove's transformation from rundown training centre to posh hotel shows just how much richer the country is now.

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