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"Do you play golf, Sian?" asked the billionaire tycoon. The MP for Swansea East admitted that she didn't, but she appeared pleased to be asked.

Few witnesses have succeeded in charming select committees as effectively as Sir Terry Matthews. The owner of Celtic Manor Resort and founder of 90 companies appeared before the Welsh affairs committee at Westminster today.

Sir Terry and Simon Gibson, chief executive of one of those companies, Wesley Clover, toured the horseshoe-shaped table to shake the hand of each of his inquisitors before the start of the 80-minute session.

Sir Terry began with an anecdote about Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mumbles and that set the tone for the day's exchanges.

The Ryder Cup was a consistent feature of the exchanges, with Sir Terry revealing that the Celtic Manor did £1m worth of future hotel business on the day the golf was rained off.

The purpose of his question to Sian James had been to explain the link between golf and business. Another question - about the MPs' experience of venture capital - met with little response.

He was polite about graduates, in a Gordon Gecko-esque way: "We have to find ways of keeping them. They have to be in business, they have to want to be rich, there's nothing wrong with having a little touch of greed, nothing wrong in that, people have to have ambitions".

Simon Gibson was less politie about civil servants: "I don't understand why a small agile country like we are or we should be in Wales is burdened with a civil service that is monolithic in its rules structure and based on something that was set up for this institution and the nation.

"We're somewhere between a small government and a local authority in terms of critical mass and size. Why don't we have an organisation that can move quickly?"

A question the MPs were able to chew over as they joined their witnesses for lunch.

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