Friday Funnies: Ta ta Taylor

BLOGGER John Duckers looks ahead to end of an era for Birmingham Business Breakfast Club.

A BIG turnout from the troops is set for next Friday and the handing over of the baton at Birmingham Business Breakfast Club.

Chairman Tony Taylor steps down at the meeting at the Botanical Gardens, giving way to young upstart Adrian Hindmarsh.

Tony has held the fort for more years than he, or probably anyone else for that matter, would care to reveal. But a jolly good effort.

The culmination of a career which came closest to brushing with fame when, on a visit to Hotel du Vin recently, Taylor found the toilet door opened by one of the cast from The Hustle.

Presumably uttering the immortal word ‘helloo’. Boom! Boom!

Or perhaps, as Taylor prefers, the day he failed to sell his mobile phone number – it ends in 2012 – to Lord Coe, who instead gave him one of the original Olympic symbol badges! But we digress.

Will the child Hindmarsh take the club on to even greater glory – the world waits with bated breath.

Celebrity speaker is Digby Lord Jones of Birmingham and, after the last time, Tony has slapped ‘Chatham House Rules’ on the event.

That was when Digby laid into former Home Secretary and Redditch MP Jacqui Smith, which was reported in the local media, subsequently requiring a grudging ‘clarification’.

Mind you, it fairly put the curse on Ms Smith whose political career promptly sank without trace.

Actually, and as Michael Caine might say, ‘not many people know this’, but Chatham House Rules do not mean you cannot report what is said, merely you can’t attribute it to anyone or indicate where it took place.

So if a piece eventually appears in this column starting along the lines of “A burly man speaking at an event somewhere in the Midlands said” then…..

Anyway, there is a charity theme as included in the £30 ticket price is a £15 donation to Women Fighting Breast Cancer which Digby will match by giving everyone a signed copy of his recent ‘best seller’, the snappily titled Fixing Britain: The Business of Reshaping Our Nation.

How many more garages full of the things has he still got to get rid of, one wonders!

Incidentally, anyone wanting to go needs to book and pay as soon as possible via the Breakfast Club website. Should be fun.

• For more questionable gossip, tittle tattle and trivia from the region’s business community see Duckers & Diving.