Back to TS's favourite subject: HM Revenue & Customs (acting) boss Dave Hartnett. Dave put up a sterling performance in his first grilling by a Treasury committee. Asked about the zillions of unopened letters strewn across tax offices up and down the land, Dave informed the committee that he recently spent a few days 'on the shop floor' in Cardiff among other places.

He saw nothing of these piles, and asked the committee and tax advisers if they'd help him find them. Dave then managed to non-plus his interrogators by informing them that the well-known freebie file-squashing tool - Winzip - was used to password protect THOSE missing discs.

If the taxman had used version 9 of the software rather than version 8, they could have encrypted the discs as well, he added.

The IT-illiterate committee members were bemused, while the rest just giggled at the use of such unsophisticated software. They should have upgraded from the free version.