Stand-in BBC News presenter, Julia Somerville, interviewing Unite union leader Tony Woodley on a fresh threat of strikes with British Airways cabin crew, said
“Both you and BA have a death grip around each other’s necks, just like Holmes and Moriarty.”
Wow, that’s an image on which to ponder.
Sir Dick Evans, former chief executive of BAE Systems, the giant defence contractor, has a surprising new role, reported in the Daily Telegraph, as chairman of Samruk, which controls 40% of the GDP of Kazakhstan’s economy.
Sir Dick now spends over half his time in the Kazakhstan political capital, Astana, using his business skills to help grow the business. Now, here’s the depressing quote about Sir Dick’s frustration at not being able to use his influence to help UK companies,
“I think it’s profoundly depressing, when you look at the number of foreign investors winning contracts here at the moment, how few British companies there are. There’s not a single British company among them – it’s because we’ve got nothing to sell them. The UK opted out of manufacturing. There are no British companies left to help.”
Jeff Randall, on Sky News Randall and Boulton Unleashed, just signed of with a lovely quote about Labour raising £1.49 million in donations in the second week of the campaign, against £2.22 million for the Tories, and £120,000 for the LibDems,
“If money talks, it’s not having a conversation with Nick Clegg.”
Fantastic quote in Rachel Sylvester’s Times article on the value of Gordon Brown to the Labour election campaign,
“Gordon is cyanide on the doorstep,” says one [Labour] candidate.
Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners has an article on the Conservative Home blog, in which he writes about political press conferences, and how to manage journalist’s questionings. In his article says,
“Clegg has an endearing, but ultimately amateurish tendency to answer the question, often at great length.”
Said by Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home in a Spectator debate, last night.
“A party leader – like a tea bag – only shows its true quality when it’s in hot water.”
Barclays Bank chief executive John Varley told the House of Commons Treasury Committee today that he thought the worst of the banking crisis is over, in this graphic quote:
“The meteorite passed without striking, thank goodness, and I think that the system today, although it’s not in rude good health, as a result of intervention by government and central banks, the system survived.”
Simon Jenkins in his Guardian article – We want Blair’s head. But Chilcot won’t give it to us – has a wonderful final sentence about the nature of inquiries into the Iraq war, by Hutton, Butler, and now Chilcot:
“It is to this that democratic accountability is reduced: long periods of silent inertia interrupted by occasional spurts of blood.”
While reading the Citywire blogs about inflation I came across this from IFA Watcher, who said,
“How do we reconcile the figures in this article with the dire warning of Weimar levels of inflation that was published in the past few days?
I am reminded of the Americans reference to the three degrees of academia. BS, MS and PhD,
Bull Shit, More of the Same and Piled Higher and Deeper.”
This is a quote from the defence team for a 22-year-old mother charged with child cruelty and abandoning her four young children to go on a 24-hour drink and drug binge,
“She was depressed because of the break-up of her long-term relationship with the father of the two boys.”
Long-term relationship at 22, and when her four children are from three fathers. Huh.
