Hold the recycled clothes and hold your tongues...

God I love The Apprentice. It makes me feel better about myself - I look like a paragon of competence next to some of these muppets. The contestants muddle their way through from task to task, messing up, moaning and bitching their way along the path to the boardroom. Mistakes pile up by the dozen, and this week was no exception.

Now, I love fashion (like most of us girls out there), so was interested to see what would happen when the teams were tasked with setting up a one day boutique in Manchester's Trafford centre. I am by no means a fashionista, but I like to think I know what makes a good outfit... unlike some of our erstwhile contenders. And I absolutely loved the sparkly, blinging party dresses that Synergy managed to blag - not surprisingly, given their enthusiasm for the clothes in comparison with Apollo's po-faced silence when confronted with the rail of beauties. So we had some WAG-ready LBDs and sequined frocks, brilliant, and brilliantly pitched for by Liz. Paloma managed to secure some "recycled" garments... clothes made out of old suits and ties, sold at extortionate prices for something that looked like a tramp had robbed a charity shop and taken a pair of scissors to fashion himself an outfit or two. Yuck.

Anyway, the shops were opened the next day, ready for some sales - proper sales, not like last week's Baby Glows and showerhead sales which all turned out to be fake, oops sorry, hypothetical. Alex (you know, the one resembling a goblin), self-proclaimed expert on the Trafford Centre geography, messed up by choosing a promotional pitch too far away from the shop, but redeemed himself by securing a short advert which was played on the big screen in the centre every fifteen minutes. The WAG dresses were flying off the shelves, Paloma and Alex were rowing about the placement of clothes rails, nobody wanted to buy the hooded waistcoats made out of old M&S suits, and Stella was sat in her boutique's window clad in a green sparkly dress, prompting Nick to compare her to an Amsterdam prozzie. Nice.

It was slightly predictable that Synergy would win the task, but impressively Apollo were only £500 behind. If only Chris had been able to sell another couple of the hideous tie dresses. And wasn't the final showdown a humdinger? Not surprisingly, Paloma dragged Alex (who she had already hinted at being to blame for the failure of the task) into the boardroom... but also Sandeesh, claiming she was overall a "weaker candidate". Interesting tactics. But ones that seemed they might work, despite Lord Sugar's initial disapporoval. It was all going so well, with Alex and Paloma snapping at each other like grouchy poodles, Paloma driving the point home that Alex failed at the pitch location task, and Alex reiterating that his advertising brainwave had more than made up for it. Paloma even told Alex that everyone else on the team found him irritating - really? Can't imagine why... now I think about it, maybe he's more like a bulldog than a goblin. Anyhoo, things were really kicking off about now, but with Paloma holding her own so well, and Lord Sugar starting to consider his point about Sandeesh being a useless waste of space, it seemed that she would live to fight (and I mean literally fight, that girl is scary) another day. And then she started laying into all and sundry, giving Alex and Sandeesh an real ear battering, and Alan just lost the plot at that point.

Paloma was fired, and it couldn't have happened to a nastier person. She made Melissa look like Mother Theresa, for God's sake. She may have had all the business savvy in the world, all the commercial experience and team leading skills, whatever ... but she hadn't learnt the most important rule of the boardroom - when to keep quiet. As Lord Sugar pointed out, she'd talked herself out of staying on. Nobody wants to work with an aggressive cow like that, after all. Poor little Alex looked like he'd faint with relief when told he was staying on, and Sandeesh had dodged the bullet again. I think it's all too easy to keep on talking when the moment has passed, and talk ourselves out of something we want, especially when we let personal opinions (Paloma's seeming hatred for Alex for example) get in the way of our ambition, intent and focus. She deserved to go, that's for sure. And the lesson learned from this? Shut up and put up, at least for the short term, if it helps you get what you want. I just wish I could get this across to my kids. I could always set an example for them, I suppose, but short of a tongue amputation, I can't see that working...