Pembroke: A poet for our times

Robin Leigh-Pemberton, Governor of the Bank of England, marked his last appearance in official guise at the Mansion House dinner with a poem specially composed to mark the event. He leaves the Bank on 30 June: from Tuesday night he had only 12 working days left in the job (although the Bank points out that he does work over the weekends too . . .).

Probably, it was all in the delivery, probably you had to be there among the hundreds of replete bankers, but we're still bringing you the verse. It ran: 'Twelve economies diverging, eleven lord mayors presiding, ten select committee MPs a-questioning, nine ERM members realigning, eight trade secretaries a-trading places, seven wise men arguing, six chief secretaries cutting, five monetary aggregates. Four chancellors of the exchequer, three deputy governors, two prime ministers and, yes, one governor, still in office, just.'

And also, although he didn't mention it, another Lord-a-Leaping.

YOU'LL remember that Will 'Darling' Carling, England's rugby union captain, has another life in the world of Big Business. His company, Inspirational Horizons, uses the experience of sportsmen to improve the pysche of businessmen: it teaches chief execs and directors much the same leadership formulae as used on the pitch and helps to improve motivation.

Ian Botham, the England cricketer, has now hopped on to the bandwagon. We've been invited to a lunch at the Oval where the great man, according to South Thames Training & Enterprise Council, will talk about the importance of investing in people, of training and development within business.

'Ian will draw on his leadership and team building experiences (and white zinc cream and mirrored sunglasses experiences?) to demonstrate how some of the sporting world's principles are paralleled in business.'

WHEN UBS Phillips & Drew went all minimalist and dropped the P&D bit, the fund management arm was very keen to remain firmly 'Phillips & Drew' and was pleased when lo, this came to pass. There's been another rethink, however, and once again it's all change - this time to UBS Asset Management.

They're a dogged bunch, the Swiss.

IT MAY be the caring sharing Nineties, but it still hurts if you're put out of a job, however delicately Price Waterhouse management consultancy breaks the news. It says it has 'recently undertaken specific reviews of its systems solutions capability'. This 'systems solutions review has confirmed the structure and size of the practice appropriate to the market place. As a result, the number of staff in systems solutions is being reduced through reallocation and, regrettably, some redundancies.'

Enough waffle. What's happened is that 106 people have lost their jobs.