The Apprentice UK, series five, episode eight

The task this week was to re-brand Margate, the faded Kent seaside town. The teams were led by Debra Barr and Yasmina Siadatan.

Debra's team decided to go for a gay theme, reasoning that the gay community had more to spend, and set about obtaining photographs and producing posters and leaflets. Mona Lewis and James McQuillan were despatched to obtain photos and Howard Ebison and Debra Barr stayed back to produce the poster and leaflets.

Yasmina's team went for a family theme, to attract families to the resort. She sent Lorraine and Ben to get the photos, while she and Kate assembled the posters and leaflets.

The teams were assessed by branding experts, as well as Margate's town officials. The verdict was that though Debra's team had a great idea, the execution was poor and Yasmina's team won.

In the boardroom Debra turned on Mona for her "lack of creativity". Even though the problem on the task was the poor execution (which Yasmina and kate on the other team had nailed).

Sir Alan fired Mona for lack of creativity without even bothering to explore the poor execution problems and Debra's culpability. I have written before that I believed that Sir Alan didn't like Mona, and the reason she lasted this long was simply because she was competant enough to be in the winning team so often and wasn't in the boardroom.

I firmly believe this is how Sir Alan operates. He makes his decision very early on, based on his particular likes, and then at the first opportunity he gets when the person is in the boardroom, he fires them. Poor Mona was a victim of this. The wrong person got fired this week.