Gordon Ramsay is not the only high-profile celebrity chef having a hard time of it. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the old Etonian contemporary of David Cameron, is not exactly flush with cash.

His new(ish) restaurant business River Cottage Stores made a loss of £272,000 in the last financial year and, with bank loans and overdrafts, most of the Fearnley-Whittingstall businesses look to be a sea of red. A food store and restaurant in Axminster, Devon, has gobbled up money and a new restaurant in Bath was recently slammed by the critics. Wouldn't Hugh be better off flogging books and making TV shows rather than trying to emulate Gordon Ramsay and creating an empire? After all, look what's happened to him.

* Hard times at Molson Coors, where the brewing pensioners have lost their entitlement to 12 dozen bottles of beer a month (that's right, 12 dozen - some might call that gross). The company has cut it back to a mere one dozen for now, and the allowance will be chopped altogether in five years' time.

Darling, how bad is the news?

BLINK and you would have missed it. HM Treasury is advertising for three senior jobs at the new asset protection agency. It's seeking a head of risk, head of service management and head of operations for the organisation, which is operating the asset protection scheme, with “c.£585bn of assets”. Gulp. That's right: £585 billion. Candidates for the risk post “will be accomplished risk managers with an extensive knowledge of the financial markets and will have complex product structuring expertise”. Yes, but £585 billion worth?

* A RARE Tory defence of Sir Alan Sugar taking on his role as New Labour business czar. Matthew Palmer, a former contestant on The Apprentice and a Tory councillor in Kensington and Chelsea gushes: “Sir Alan may be a Labour supporter … but on his new job, he sees it as politically neutral'.

“He has a passion to help where bureaucrats and politicians constantly fail, and he will only be advising on policy and not making it. He has got a great deal of business acumen and a large book of contacts. His long history of business highs and lows should be seen as an open business encyclopaedia for the use of anyone who is willing to take him out of the library — and we should not let his skills be ignored by David Cameron's team, just because he is not one of us'.”

Sugar, though, could have done without one of Palmer's observations: “Along the way he has made many mistakes — most recently the Amstrad emailer (during The Apprentice it was being discreetly filmed in use at every opportunity to look like a great product. But behind the scenes, the production crew were cursing it because it was useless).”

* LAST year's oil prices were a never-before-seen all-time record. Tosh, say the economic historians at BP. Their logarithms indicate that the $97 a barrel average oil price last year does not even compare with the heights recorded in the Pennsylvanian oil boom of the 1860s. In today's money, the price of oil then hit an annualised high of $110 a barrel.

* HOW can start-up businesses hope to raise cash, what with venture capital having all but dried up? Increasingly, “3F” is the answer — that is, friends, family and fools.

1700-year pay gap to bridge at Beeb

* BBC director-general Mark Thompson has met his stars to tell them the days of big pay deals for them are over. But what of his own salary and those of the Corporation's lesser lights?

This year, 400 senior managers, including Thompson and BBC1 controller Jay Hunt, accepted salary freezes and saw bonuses axed. Last week, workers were offered a flat £450 pay rise to “bridge the gap between the highest earners and those at the bottom of the scale”.

Oh dear, that hasn't gone down well. One BBC News staffer writes in Ariel, the in-house magazine, that it would take “around 1700 years” for his pay to reach that of the director general, even if Thompson's stays frozen...

* MORE on how the bank meltdown has hit London bankers. Annual accounts, just filed at Companies House, for Morgan Stanley & Co, UK subsidiary of the US banking giant, show the highest-paid director's salary was slashed by more than 60% from $7.1 million to $2.2 million for the 13 months to 31 December 2008 (beating, incidentally, Goldman Sachs International — where the highest-paid director in the Fleet Street office walked away with $1.9 million). The annual report doesn't identify the lucky chap but the board included three of the bank's biggest London players: Franck Petitgas, Simon Robey, and Michael Zaoui, who stepped down during the year. Total remuneration for the five board directors was $6 million, down from $15.9 million in 2007. Those close to Morgan Stanley say this company does not cover all the bank's London operations. Income was a relatively modest $602.3 million. The main London international operation has yet to release its accounts...

* CHICHESTER'S Festival Theatre is putting on a play called Enron, about the Enron financial scandal. Sam West is going to play Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO who drove the Texas company onto the rocks. Tim Pigott-Smith will play Ken Lay, Enron's founder. With trendy Rupert Goold directing, don't expect it to be a celebration of the virtues of capitalism and the energy industry.

* WHILE Setanta struggles to avoid administration, how do the football authorities feel? Judging by the reaction of some of those present at a sports industry breakfast at the National Theatre, there's not much affection for the Irish broadcaster. It has struggled to keep fans happy with a patchy service and less-than-perfect customer relations. Football bosses are also delighted to see the back of Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. The Everton fan was highly opinionated and interventionist, making it clear he would like to ensure more sporting games are “free-to-air” rather than “pay-per-view”. New minister Ben Bradshaw is expected to be more pliable…