Backbytes: Carly Fiorina. Hobson's choice for president?

Fiorina's business record doesn't really stand up to close scrutiny

There's probably no better advert for libertarianism or genuine anarchism than the current crop of politicians, pretty much anywhere in the world.

The US presidential elections are a case in point. On one side, there's bumbling Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton both having another crack at the top job they're both plainly ill-suited to - indeed, Clinton never has adequately explained why such a technophobe should decide she needs her own email server at home. The less said about the rest of them, the better.

Then, on the other side, there's Monster Raving Donald Trump, who has all the social graces of a fart in a lift, and promises to solve all those tricky problems he struggles to comprehend (near enough everything) simply by hiring very clever people to "work it out". He's joined by a gaggle of pseudo-religious nutters who eschew science, learning and knowledge etc. And Carly Fiorina.

Part of the appeal of Fiorina is the fact that she seems fairly normal for a politician (alongside the other candidates, who couldn't?) and that she's actually had a proper job outside of the bubble of politics and can even boast of some level of success - she's been the CEO of a company people have actually heard of.

But just a modicum of analysis of her business record would tend to suggest it's little better than Trump's Chapter-11-strewn career.

She master-minded the incomprehensible business decision to takeover PC-maker Compaq, pushing HP further into low-margin PCs, a move it is only now shaking off with the demerger of PCs and printers from the heavyweight side of the business. The stock price almost halved during her tenure and most of HP's main rivals all did better from 1999 to 2005, when she was in charge of HP.

Her time at networking hardware maker Lucent, meanwhile, was punctuated by her pushing of "innovative financial solutions" to help customers buy the company's products during the dot-com boom - a leveraged sales boom that came back to bite the company after she'd already jumped ship.

Lucent survived by spinning off or selling major parts of its business, and by making redundant thousands of staff. It was absorbed by fellow communications hardware basket case Alcatel in 2006.