The reason we have a steadily growing problem with unemployment in this country is that Lord Burns has all the jobs, and there is none left for anyone else.

Terry Burns has just been named as the successor to Luke Johnson as chairman of Channel 4. However, he is also the chairman of Abbey National and until this year the chairman of Marks & Spencer, as well as being a non-executive director of Banco Santander, non-executive director of the Pearson Group, the president of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, president of the Society of Business Economists, chairman of the governing board of the Royal Academy of Music, a non-executive chairman of Welsh Water, and he also plays in the centre of midfield for Queens Park Rangers and sells “Digby the dancing trout” novelty gifts from a stall down East Street market.

Actually, I lied about the last two, but the rest are true. Do you ever wonder how people get jobs, I mean the really big jobs paying more in a year than you’ll earn in two decades?

I wondered about this when I watched Adam Crozier breeze over from the Football Association to the Post Office, having foisted the calamitously expensive and largely unsuccessful Sven-Goran Eriksson upon the national team and alienated every club in the Premier League.

I thought at first Adam had simply got a round with the Royal Mail, helping out with the Christmas post: then the truth dawned. They were going to let him run the whole thing.

It was at that precise moment that I transferred my postal account to TNT, fearing — with some justification, as it turned out — the worst. I don’t know who runs TNT. Probably Terry Burns.

You look at these people and think, well, it must be something mighty brilliant with their CVs, something mysteriously captivating.

But looking at Lord Burns, I can’t quite see what it is: he is not called Teflon Terry for nothing. He staggers from controversy to controversy and the only thing that sticks to the chap is another enormous bloody salary — usually, although not exclusively, the gift of political patronage or quasi-political patronage. The national lottery commission, for example, which he ran for a year or so. Or the inquiry into hunting with hounds, which he chaired.

We first learnt about Terry when he was permanent secretary to the Treasury under Norman Lamont at the time of Britain’s gravest economic humiliation in 50 years, when the country was forced to pull sterling out of the European exchange rate mechanism.

This is the thing with Terry: he is not brought in at a time of crisis to sort things out, he is brought in and then the crises occur, and he doesn’t really sort them out.

He also chaired the inquiry into the renewal of the BBC’s licence fee but his recommendations were cheerfully ignored by the government. That seems to be pretty much his sole experience of the broadcasting industry.

Poor Channel 4 — bereft, skint and purposeless, it desperately needed a new boss from a vibrant, high-performing sector of the economy and chose for itself someone from ... the banking sector. A man with not a vestige of either interest in or experience of programme-making and whose only contribution to the broadcasting sector was quietly forgotten by the government. (“The Burns Report, you say? Oh, um, yes, vaguely heard of it. Think it’s being used to balance the X-Box in the spare bedroom, isn’t it, Tessa?”) There is not much left of Channel 4, either philosophically or, if we are to believe its chief executive, Andy Duncan, financially. Just a sort of vague silhouette of Jon Snow rather forlornly waving a white flag on the 7 o’clock news.

Its advertising revenue is down, it no longer innovates and the genre it introduced to the country — reality TV — is debased and derided. It has been reduced to begging for money from the BBC.

I wonder if Teflon Terry will see it off for good?

+ Apparently one in 20 British schoolchildren believes that the Holocaust was a huge party held at the end of the war to celebrate victory over the Germans. And 10% think that the letters SS stand for the Secret Seven, a whole bunch more think that Auschwitz was actually a rather fun theme park and that Hitler is the manager of the German national football team.

Such innocence: if only all this were true, the world would be a much happier place. They might also believe that Mussolini was one of the judges on Masterchef, V2 one of those tone deaf but pneumatic girl bands that recently failed on The X Factor and Marshal Zhukov something to do with the house elves in an early Harry Potter film. The second world war is receding from the national memory and becoming a thing of only the slightest import. But the kids know all about Mary Seacole, which is the crucial thing.

I wish that minority had been right about Hitler, though. Can you imagine the post-match press conferences after a walkover against France? Hitler dancing a jig and de Gaulle, at the bottom of the table, suggesting that the lads done good, but it’s a game of two halves, wait for the return leg, mate . . .

U2’s curtain call

At least 100,000 Germans — unaccountably, you might think — wished to watch the pompous stadium rock band U2 play a concert commemorating the 20th anniversary of the demolition of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. Only 10,000 tickets were available for the concert — so to prevent those who didn’t have tickets from watching Bono’s shrieking, guess what they did? They built a two-metre high wall around the arena. I don’t know if it was patrolled with machinegunners, but it did arouse animosity. As Pete Townshend had it, all those years ago: “Meet the new boss — same as the old boss.” If only we could build a really large wall around Bono Honecker, as he will henceforth be known.

A medical excuse that’s hard to swallow

The former lord mayor of Coventry is in trouble because he made lewd and lascivious remarks about orgasms to an unnamed female chief executive while, uh, relaxing at an official function. It makes the story all the more pleasurable that Tory councillor Andrew Matchet made his comments within the hearing of Laura Slegg, then the council’s equality and diversity officer. That was never going to work out too well, was it, mate?

Nor has Andy particularly improved his position by explaining that he’s sorry, but he can’t remember a thing about the evening in question because he was out of his brainbox on codeine, ibuprofen and something called Do-Do tablets, a form of amphetamine, which he had taken on account of his “bad back”. You and me both, Andy. Nothing like a spot of whizz to sort out the old discs.

Andy was once a member of the Communist party. Good job he isn’t now, or he’d be in Omsk hacking at a salt seam.

+ A Buddhist prisoner in Germany has been refused permission to have visits from his pet cat, Gisela — despite his claim that the creature is the reincarnation of his mother. Peter K — all prisoners in Germany are required to pretend they are characters in a Kafka novella — has apparently been unable to give hard evidence to the authorities that the cat really is his mum.

I wonder what would convince them? Give the cat a blue rinse and equip it with one of those tartan shopping trolleys? I suspect only DNA will do for the Germans; they are so literal.

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