The rest of his remarks are unprintable

The rest of his remarks are unprintable.Mr Byers is gamely hanging on to his job as the evidence of ineptitude continues to mount against him. The latest blow to his credibility was the publication of the minutes from his fabled meeting with the Railtrack chairman. These fail to support Mr Byers’ assertion that John Robinson demanded a blank cheque otherwise the company would cease to be a going concern.The explanation, says Mr Byers, is simple – Mr Robinson asked for that part of the meeting not to be minuted Rubbish, replies Mr Robinson, I said no such thing. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Mr Byers, to use one of the minister’s own favourite phrases, has become “part of the problem, not the solution”.Even though Mr Byers tried to bury the minutes by publishing them just as Gordon Brown got up to speak on Tuesday, the storm grows worse, not better.

Yesterday’s lobby briefing at Downing Street spent as much time dissecting Byersgate as the Chancellor’s pre-Budget statement.Just as Mr Byers has inexplicably stood by his discredited special adviser, Jo “bury the bad news” Moore, so the Prime Minister stands by his discredited Secretary of State. Ditching Mr Byers would make it look as though Mr Blair no longer believed in his policy on Railtrack, which would present the PM with quite a problem given that he approved it. But the longer Mr Byers stays in office, the more the Government itself is damaged. At one stage, a discreet mid-term reshuffle looked like the answer.

No longer.j.warner independent.co.uk. Japan has joined Italy as the second member of the Group of Seven to have its credit rating downgraded by Standard & Poor’s to AA – the other G7 countries are all on the top rating, AAA – but because the markets expected an even steeper downgrading they pushed the yen up. What matters is that Japan is borrowing itself into a corner, from which it will be hard to escape. Debt is already 130 per cent of GDP and on some projections will reach 180 per cent in five years time. While that is a lot lower than the 300 per cent of GDP that British national debt reached at the end of the Second World War, it would be the sharpest rise of any developed country since 1945.To have allowed debt to rise so fast with so little impact on Japanese growth must rank as one of the most serious errors of fiscal policy by a developed country since Britain’s bailout by the IMF in 1976. While the servicing cost of the debt is low because interest rates are so low, the combination of declining GDP both in money and real terms and continuing deficits makes it very hard to see how Japan will dig itself out.Fiscal policy has failed; monetary policy has failed; in the short term, at least, structural policies such as deregulation – however essential in the medium term – may make matters worse.

And all this comes as the world slithers into the worst downturn since the 1970s.The progressive downgrading of Japanese performance as this year has worn on is shown in the top graph. In January the consensus was that Japan would grow by just less than 2 per cent next year; now it is minus 0.5 per cent. With the exception of the UK, everyone has been radically downgraded, which incidentally make a bit of a mockery of such forecasts. But Japan has fared far worse than everyone else.Most people outside the country are unaware what has been happening to Japanese living standards over the past decade.