Markus Jooste, the CEO of Steinhoff, often used to tell us during meetings at one of the entities of which I was a director, that when you become engaged in an argument with a fool, you cannot win and end up looking like a fool yourself.

There is no better illustration of it at the moment, than the celebrity fight going on between Oksana Grigorieva and Mel Gibson where she claims he hit her in the face and he claims she tried to extort money from him. At the end of the day, and given Mel Gibson’s previous ranting and ravings a year or so ago, he walked away thinking that she is a gold digger, and that he is some ego-inflated, aging star, who simply cannot control himself. In short, you have a poorer opinion of both of them. It is a tremendous pity that more people cannot solve their problems more quietly and out of the public eye.