The site that gave us those classic one-line headlines “Kuwait Deploys Troop” and “Kevin Bacon linked to Osama Bin Laden” [think about it] excels itself this week. I’m not quoting the current ones here because they should be enjoyed alongside the relevant images. Just check out the top right-hand corner of The Onion’s front page.
14Nov04 — 1
Chancellor gunning for ‘Mc Rover’ Executives
Gordon Brown was most direct as he tore into the executives responsible for creaming off £40 million from Rover.
Stay oaf ma turf. If anyone’s going to raid a pension fund and steal the workers’ money to fund their gang, there’s only one name on the list, and that’s me.
The chancellor was the epitome of una-browed menace as he warned off the competition in an exclusive interview granted to CLAREFication Online
They call their self the Phoenix Four, but there’s going to be no coming back to life when a’ve finished with them. They’ll be deed and they’ll stey deed.
Earlier I had been picked up in a sinister black jaguar. I was blindfolded by a thuggish looking man who only identified himself as ‘JP’. Amidst the intense secrecy necessary to avoid public scrutiny, I was taken to a location known only as ‘Number 11′.
As I interviewed him in ‘Number 11′, Brown went on to criticize Patricia Hewett’s role in the affair.
That was an inside Job. Naming no names, but that Patricia Hewett will be going doon. She gets me to put in £500 million by telling me the name of the company is MC ROVER, I ask you. Then they get to purchase it for a tenner. Well ma darlin’, enjoy your cut for the short time you have left.
The Chancellor also criticized the Chinese rescue plan.
I mean, what are these guys doing getting the Shaghard Automotive Consortium involved. Every plastic gangster out there knows they’re a front for the Triads. They boys are heavy man. They’ll cut you into little pieces and serve you up for breakfast wi’ some soya sauce.
Unexpectedly the Longbridge workers came in for some stick.
This morning, six thousand workers all turned up to a mass rally. That’s five thousand more than would turn up to do some work. I looks at them and I thinks: serves youse right. Who’d ha’ the sense to hand their money to someone and expect it back forty years doon the line?
He eulogised over his own performance in office though.
Ah! You’se talking about The ’97 raid?
Git the idea fur Bobby Maxwell; there was a villain if ever I saw one. Nobody would notice the money had gone till they retired thirty years in the future, and he’d be long gone by then. He would have gotten away with it all, but he stopped paying anything to the big man, Tony, I mean.
That’s how you end up fish food.
Charitably he offered the Rover directors his professional advice.
They boys from the Towers Group should sit up an’ take note on how to pull off a really big pension raid.
The ’97 raid netted Fifty Billion from Pension Fund UK. Fifty Billion versus a wee little forty million from Mc Rover. So who’s the Pension Raider Daddy, eh?
The four hundred million losses they made might sound impressive, but you should see ma deficit. It’s huge!
Strangely Brown did not rule out the possibility of future co-operation.
I can mebe see them as Ocean’s Eleven Style young bloods, but its going to be me pulling the strings. Ma gang, ma rules.
Unlike the rest of Britain, the Chancellor was looking forward to his own retirement.
Ma Pension fund is so big it takes me ten minutes to write out all the zeroes. And the best thing about it is, guess who’s paying (laughs)? The people whose pensions I stole.
A might do a late night spot on Channel Four to keep my profile out there. I hear that Roberta Kray does a good show.
(Apologies to Irving Walsh