In the case of Charleroi, there is also an answer to the state subsidy problem – simply privatise the airport.But there is a gnawing worry that Mr O’Leary’s chickens may at last be coming home to roost. The Ryanair boss has bounced back from his latest setback in the courts with a tirade against the French for banning the state subsidies the airline receives to fly the London-Strasbourg route.Some time early next year the European Commission will rule likewise in respect of the deal Ryanair gets to operate into Brussels Charleroi airport. Saving the earth does not come cheap.RyanairFrom one kind of wind power to another; the indefatigable Michael O’Leary, who was in full flow as usual yesterday, telling an interviewer that he was neither a “cloud bunny”, nor an “aerosexual”. If the Government were to choose everything from the menu of environmental improvements before it, then up to £13.4bn would have to be added to water bills.As Mr Fletcher reminded the Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett, hard choices will have to be made quite shortly The same applies to electricity. So consumers will have to get accustomed to dearer electricity. They will also have to get used to more expensive water, as the industry regulator Philip Fletcher pointed out yesterday to his political masters. The Government simply cannot afford to allow it to fail as a technology for the simple reason that without wind power, Britain has no hope of meeting its greenhouse gas targets.

Wind power is up to twice the price of fossil-fuelled electricity and even nuclear energy beats it on cost, if the back-end decommissioning costs are excluded.Advances in technology, allied to bigger turbines, have brought costs down and the economies of scale of building up to 7,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity should further narrow the differential with other energy forms.But as far ahead as it is possible to see, wind will need a subsidy to compete and that subsidy will be paid for by the consumer. The move offshore will encounter much less environmental opposition than the increasingly contentious siting of onshore wind farms. But it is not so much the aesthetic issues that are likely to concern us but the cost of this new source of energy.The wind may be free but the electricity generated from it certainly is not. Offshore wind turbines, some up to 260ft high, she is referring to. The Trade and Industry Secretary had better be right since the Crown Estate has just sanctioned the construction of six giant wind farms off the Norfolk coast, where Ms Hewitt holidays most years.Altogether, the go-ahead was given this week for up to 2,500 offshore turbines capable of generating enough electricity to power one in six UK homes.

The only one of significance his Terra Firma fund has pulled off is the refinancing of a waste business. There may be brass in muck but it is hardly the stuff of which City legends are made.With £1m in severance pay and the dividends rolling in from her personal stake in Philip Green’s Bhs, Ms Saunders should be able to keep the wolf from the door. And, if she does make a comeback in her own right, then we will see just how good she really is.Costing the earthThey will, says Patricia Hewitt, look like “the tiny masts of distant yachts”, even on the clearest of days. Mr Hands had his own little disaster – the Le Meridien hotel chain which, in effect, went bust under the weight of its debts, forcing the Japanese bank to write off its equity.It’s cold on the outside and without the large arm of an international bank around his shoulders Mr Hands has found it tough to raise his own funds and even tougher to land deals. Unfortunately, it is the misses that everyone remembers and her fate was sealed almost from the moment she put her name at the bottom of the press release announcing the refinancing of the television rental chain BoxClever.For five years, WestLB punched above its weight with the aid of its London-based principal finance unit and at one time it even entertained a takeover of the railways.