From Russia with Love

God! I will pack, order my plane,
And get me to England once again.

For England’s the one land I know
Where a Moscow parvenu may go,
Make Kensington by ten to three,
And know there’s caviar still for tea.

By private jet to Luton town,
We Oligarchs are raining down,
Sikorski rotors idling free
To whisk us on to Battersea;
And thence by liveried chauffeur
To One Hyde Park or Berkeley Square;

Or other bijou pieds-a-terre,
Courtesy of Candy Bros, and where
Your media, oil or metals Czar,
Who’s dreamed of Xanadu from afar.
May each his pleasure dome decree,
Unhassled by the KGB.

To Knightsbridge and to Belgrave Square
We come, the exiled billionaires,
Who’ve swapped our hammers and our sickles
For Harrods, Heals and Harvey Nichols;
Let loose our friendly business drones
On Stamford Bridge and Waterstones.

Say, where’s such Beauty yet to find?
Such certainty, such quiet mind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? …oh! Yet

Stands Big Ben’s clock at ten to three ?
And is there caviar still for tea ?

From ‘Profiles of Our Business Greats’.
With grateful acknowledgements to Rupert Brooke (‘Grantchester’ 1912) longing for England…

@copy; Ralph Windle 2012

Tearaway

Branson is as Branson does,
All floppy-joe and levi;
Your fuzzy-round-the-chin-and-nose-
And-doesn’t-wear-a-suit guy.
Billionairish, late of Stowe,
Business up and surgin’,
Spawning music, travel though
Likes to keep it Virgin.
Not a friend of British Air,
Says they’re all deception,
Virgin’s being, as it were,
Immaculate Conception.
Ricky, Ricky Debonnair
Keeps the City swooning,
Now the Madcap Mariner,
Now hot-air ballooning.
Round the World in Eighty Days?
That went out with Moses.
He’ll be round and back, he says,
Before the Footsie closes.
To Bankers, in their Saville Row,
A mite uncouth and shifty,
Worried where-the-hell he’ll blow,
Now he’s over fifty.
Long-term rifter of the lute
Embarrassingly blighted,
Since topper, tie and morning suit
Declared a Branson Knighted.
Will he, won’t he still be Rick,
The guy who don’t care tuppence,
Or has another Take-the-Mick
Received his Royal Come-Uppance?

Anita Roddick

She trades in Beauty, sells delight
In Earth’s old fruits for bathroom bowls;
Helps Nature put its shop to rights,
Ride high the skin-and-shampoo polls.
Yet Body Shop’s symbolic lights
Burn less for Bodies than for Souls.

Scourge of myopic Corporate Man,
‘Profits-with-Principle’ the prize,
She made old nostrums hit the fan
And Footsie dinos demonise
Such dangerously cool élan
For mixing Care with Enterprise.

She’s thrived, this Phoenix-from-the-Ash,
On constant gloom from City ghouls,
Tut-Tutting on the Cult-of-Cash
Writ deep in Holy Market rules.
She floats, uncluttered by the trash
She never learned at business schools.

She’s whetted appetites to go,
By roads less travelled through the door
Marked Ogoni and Kayapo,
And peasant-mums in Changapur;
Dared mention ethics in the glow
Of Earth Com.’s Global SuperStore.

Whose World is it this rich man’s quorum
Dare name ‘WORLD’ Economic Forum ?
Where are the women who’d connive
To keep such sexist fakes alive ?
How many cocktail hours elapse
Before their obscene earnings gaps
Stir to some late reluctant action
This self-indulgent feckless faction ?

Grant, if you will, we lesser-fry
Who pay their bills to question why ?
To have in mind when next we’re voting
This nauseous cosying and doting;
Where spineless politicians greet
Their self-styled corporate elite;
Pre-groomed for peak-time camera focus,
On clouds of PR hocus-pocus.

Above all, may it be Thy wish
To raise, above their gibberish,
Those richer voices, dimmed of late,
Who want their World back, and it’s fate;
So other kids may go to bed
Well- fed with, ringing in their head,
Stories of how an old god winked,
Pronouncing Davos-Man extinct.

Only Connect

He talks of art in a turbine’s blade,

Of the poem in a jet of steam
Says beauty’s about in the pulsing flow
That powers the electric beam.
Insists there’s room in a craftsman’s kit
For the spanner and the dream.

He’s dared wax lyrical about
A dam. With great bravado
Lobbed Stephenson and Faraday
Up there with Leonardo.
Turned down the tired old Hobson’s choice
Of chips or avocado.

That autobiographic mix
Of early scouse with geordie,
Has charmed the technologic socks
Off Chinaman and Saudi.
Won unique honours from Korea,
All maxima cum laude.

He’s tramped more bridges round the globe
Than seconds in the hour,
From Sidney to Millennium,
Hong Kong to Tyne and Tower,
He’s made the bridge our metaphor
For mixing sweet and sour.

He’s seen, rewritten in the runes,
What energies flood forth
When sculptor crafts with engineer
Some Angel of the North.
Just as when science, craft and art
First jointly bridged the Forth.

Where Parsons, Royce and Reyrolle trod
He’s been and doffed his hat,
But ‘best’ means always yet to come
In Hawley’s habitat.
Only Connect’s his arbiter
Of where our future’s at.

(From ‘Profiles of Our Business Greats’)

A Tyrant and a Playwright Came…

With quite modest antecedents I’d inclined in youth

To an adolescent’s yearnings for the Right and Truth;

But, making it to Oxford, learned a life’s better spent

More in wooing than in rueing the Establishment.

Fell in love with most things media, made a dead set at my Jag,

Got my Second politicking on the student rag.

With such mandatory trinkets I was set to shine

Among intellects a little less acute than mine,

But with ‘bureaucrat’ engraved upon the old C.V.

Was advised that where it’s really at is Industry –

Not the dogsbodies of do-ers or the ones who pay the bills,

But the Davos-hopping Raiders of the Corporate Tills..

Though little versed in business, I then holed in one

Peddling old McKinsey whimsy on the way it’s done;

Learned the comfortable insight that a Board’s elite

Needs to soil its hands with little but a balance- sheet.

Much  exposure on the telly, lots of media-chit-and-chat

Apotheosed me from a  ‘Bureau –‘ to a ‘ Eurocrat’.

Yet the bane of  ex-McKinseys ,reaching boldly for their sky,

Was the mandatory porridge with the dear-old  CBI.

After which, with no remission,  I was on my  way

To be finance-friendly  founder of the FSA;

So that bonus-hungry bankers could securitise their credits

Without some Regulator fool  to bite the hand that fed it..    

Yet, just when safe in LSE’s calm Groves of Academe,

A Tyrant and A Playwright came, unravelling my dream.

The pesky David Hare and media moralists were leaping

To uncomfortable truths about some company I’d been keeping.

So, what between the Melt-Downs and the Surfeits of Gaddafis,

I’ll be sitting this one out until I’m sure whose the last laugh is.

( from ‘ Profiles of Our Business Greats’ )                         

‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment…’

When a Chairman makes a million per annum
– one per annum,
Helping half-an-earth to smoke itself to death,
– self to death,
You can understand his knighthood, for to ban ’em
– for to ban ’em,
Might well strangulate our economic breath.
– nomic breath.

Furthermore, if you can offer ’em insurance,
– em insurance,
At a premium that boosts yer Eagle Star,
– Eagle Star,
Then it follers that your corporate allurance,
– rate allurance,
Makes a Government think what a Czar you are.
– Zar you are.

When you’ve spent a whole decade conglomerating,
– glomerating,
Everything from scent to Saks, Fifth Avenue,
– ave a new,
It takes genius to come up later stating
– later stating,
That unbungling it was what you meant to do.
– meant to do.

So it’s obviously quod est demonstrandum,
– dem and strand em,
When constabulary duty’s to be done,
– to be done,
That a Minister can’t pick and choose at random
– chews at randum,
But prefers the business brain of such a one.
– such a one.

What a pity it took all this fuss and puther,
– fuss and puther,
On how coppers tick, and best to catch the lags,
– catch the lags,
To remind ’em, taking one thing with another,
– with another,
A policeman’s lot is not a pack o’ fags.
– pack o’ fags.

Salaams to the great Gilbert and Sullivan

Saucerer’s Apprentice

Lord, bless these Sugar wannabees,
Grant them the ‘Go’ to knock the Knuchies,^*
The gift of gall to slither past his
Trick-or-treats for boardroom rookies.

Make each the one who most aspires,
Exudes the spunk and compost-mentis^**
To weasel round one last ‘ You’re Fired’,
Become this media-gog’s Apprentice.

Tell not such feckless guys and gels
The real world keeps rotating;
That Management by Decibels
Long dropped out of the ratings.

Ask not who beebed him to debase
‘Apprentice’ – long a word of honour,
Downgrade it to this charmless chase
For the new style TV corporate conner.

But maybe tell our Noble Fraud
The times are now propitious,
To flog back to the House of Lords
His box of rotting fishes.

^* Lord Sugar word for ‘wimps’
^** sic

Our Business Gurus

This is a song to celebrate Gurus.
Not the retiring kind who sit cross-legged among the kookaburrus,
But Gurus of the Business-Con-Fraternity,
Hyping the Hot News on the Corporate Highways to Eternity.

Prophetic pushers of The Panacea
Which every Bain and Booz consultant craved to hear,
As each new Shaman of the Corporate Zen
Reincarnated Arthur Andersen.

Stand by, though, for the new, improved mind-slammer,
The next big Buzz-Wow after Michael Hammer!
Surfing the deep, cool Cyberspace to greet us,
Behold Pre-Emptive-Total-Excellence-Renewal-Systems (PETERS),

Which next should save us from the yawning
Boredom of actually managing and performing.

Apologies to Ogden Nash.

For England and Saint George

I am your very model of a Bank of England Governor,
Inspiring just the right degree of enviable love and awe.
To the hoi polloi I’m ‘Eddie’
But, as Edward the Unready,
Suffered much frustrating waiting from the chap before.

When at last I scooped the pools, they had but little doubt I’d hanker
To be the more teutonic type of Fuhrer Bundesbanker.
Independence I had wanted
Since that late and unLamonted
Chancellor both blew the gaffe and dragged his anchor.

Yet even I could not conceive the blessings my Good Fairy
Would heap upon me courtesy of Messrs Brown and Blairie –
Retinues of Alpha Pluses
Of financial geniuses
To protect me in my fiscal reliquary.

Who said the dear Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is past it?
I’ll make at least a Merry Widow out of her or, blast it,
Only when Sir Eddie’s ready
Will the pound start going steady
With the Euro or, should passion cool, outlast it!