I know, I know. Bill Thomas, our Small Business Taskforce Chair, will never forgive me. It's an age thing! @Newsnight

— Ed Balls (@edballs) February 3, 2015

So who is Bill anyway? Flashback to 2011 and Guido ran through the CV of a Bill Thomas, then the boss of EDS and a member of Labour’s defence procurement review:

In 2006 RAF servicemen didn’t get paid for six weeks after EDS botched the implementation of new software. The £456 million Child Support Agency system, built by EDS, had “five hundred faults in the three years after it went live”. The Agency ended up manually inputting 36,900 cases as a result of an EDS IT failure. In 2003, Bill himself took full responsibility for a Revenues and Customs IT disaster that shafted the Inland Revenue. It is widely considered to be the worst government IT cock-up ever. EDS had to pay-out £70 million in compensation for the mess, but negotiated further government work before paying up.

Since these stunning successes, Bill went on to be a director at the Co-operative Bank; serving on the board with everyone’s favourite comedy crack-head, the Crystal Methodist Reverend Flowers. In 2007 Bill told the Telegraph “if things go well it’s not interesting”, a mantra clearly adopted by the Shadow Chancellor…