At the BBC we’ve had plenty of women in good management jobs. It comes and goes but there’s been plenty. On air, I think there’s quite a bit more we can do.

Historically, the British have always been rather wary of grand engineering projects – perhaps understandably, given that many of them have been delivered late and over budget.

The Germans are clear about what they do – cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do – electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do – they’re the workshop of the world.

Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it’s often a very good way of clarifying issues.

Being funny, it turns out, is like being a bank. It’s a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you, you are fine.

Personally, I’d like us to have a few more women on the ‘Today’ programme.

One of the key problems is that the Germans know what they do because everywhere they go there’s a ‘made in Germany’ label on it – they can feel proud of Volkswagens and Audis and Mercedes.

Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don’t see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world’s mobile phones.

We all know that Americans love their statistics – in sport, obviously. And in finance too.

Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we’ll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.