It's (R)Over

Quick note for my overseas visitors : Rover - British car manafacturer regarded in automobile circles (and indeed the City) as outstandingly crap. If you were a middle-manager during the 1990s and not cool enough for a Ford, you'd drive one of these...

Alternatively think of M&S on wheels...

Having been ditched by BMW (who wisely realised it was making no money) it was bought by a bunch of venture capitalists, Pheonix, who's trimphant achievement (admittedly quite impressive) was to bring the company's losses down from £800m to £77m a year. Wow, I'm gonna invest my money ! Anyway, it looked for a while that Pheonix had found a bunch of gullable Chinese to buy our pisspoor car maker. Unfortuantely they too are beginning to realise they are boarding the Titanic of the business world, and are demanding guaruntees from Pheonix

So now Pheonix have asked the Rev Blair for a £100m bridging load to stop the banks pulling the plug...unfortunately His Reverence will now have to choose between on the one hand his dogmatic free market principles and on the other hand his natural desire to prevent mass job losses being announced less than a month before a general election which looks increasingly likely to turn on Brown's management of the UK economy.

Will Tony be able to suspend or modify his principles for favourable headlines ? Stay tuned to find out - although I think we already know the answer...