Diary: Dyson wipes floor with Sugar

Fans of The Apprentice will have noted that this week's victim of the "boardroom" was Glen, a senior design engineer. "I've never come across an engineer who can turn his hands to business," raged Lord Sugar, his face wrinkling like an angry testicle. "You're fired." Sir James Dyson, engineer and entrepreneur, begs to differ. "Britain should value its engineers," he said yesterday. "It is engineers who will develop new British technology that we can sell around the world." Sir James was, of course, far too polite to mention that his estimated net worth happens to be £1.45bn – almost double that of Lord Sugar (£770m).

* This column would like to be the first to congratulate humble-as-humble-pie polymath Rory Stewart on his forthcoming elevation to the top rank of public life. Sadly, George (né Gideon) Osborne and Peter Mandelson seem to have got there before me. Stewart, you see, accompanied Gideon and Mandy to this week's curiously under-reported Bilderberg conference in St Moritz: a TED-meets-the-Freemasons-style annual executive retreat for CEOs, leading politicians, billionaire industrialists and other assorted Illuminati reptilian humanoids. The former soldier, adventurer, diplomat, academic, prince among men and man among princes was spotted walking (he does love a walk) in the Swiss countryside with, among others, the Chinese vice-minister of foreign affairs and the executive chairman of Google, each wearing their Bilderberg-branded red anoraks. After performing all those secret handshakes, I expect him to have secured an invitation to the cabinet table before the year is out. Given that he has previously compared himself to T E Lawrence, Alexander the Great and the fictional demigod Achilles, I imagine he's expecting the same thing.

* Breaking news from Stroud, Gloucestershire. The quiet community of King's Stanley has been rocked by the theft of two concrete ducks and two ducklings, along with a concrete hedgehog, from a front garden in Wigmore Green between 4pm on Thursday June 9 and 11am on Sunday 11 June. I feel bound to inform the police of the proximity of the aforementioned crime scene to Lily Allen's wedding reception, which took place on Saturday afternoon. Might the culprit have been a drunken reveller, lost on his/her way to Stroud railway station? I'd search lost property at Paddington if I were you.

* The Lady's editor Rachel Johnson, whose freelance op-ed writing seems tailored specifically to attract the attention of columns such as this one, has succeeded again in doing just that. Not long ago she informed Vogue readers that her teenage daughter had undergone a Brazilian; now she writes in The Spectator of her lustful feelings towards the alleged rapist, long-standing Bilderbergerer and erstwhile MD of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. "I can't help finding his primate hulk, his leonine brow and serpentine cleverness somewhat attractive," she confesses, creepily. Wondering why she should be so drawn to the 62-year-old hand-wanderer, she consulted her brother, alleged babydaddy Boris, asking him what attracted respectable ladies to apparently repulsive males. "Very simple," the Mayor replied. "Women cannot resist men who obviously like women." And he would know.

* We return to the row over the Rear of the Year "competition". After bookies refunded any bum punts placed on Pippa Middleton's notable behind, the organiser Tony Edwards has emailed to insist again that Carol Vorderman won the chance to be photographed in conspicuously branded jeans thanks to a democratic vote, and not because Pippa refused the invitation to this particular bunfight. Edwards was also unimpressed with the bookies' behaviour, claiming "The only reason bookmakers continue to offer odds on 'fantasy' lists born of their own, uninformed, imagination is to create publicity for themselves." Funny that, since he and his colleagues were more than happy to blow smoke up Pippa's arse, as it were, in the days after its royal wedding debut. More on this story as it develops.

highstreetken@independent.co.uk