The Empire Strikes Out

Dear Rupe.......You don't mind if I call you Rupe, Rupe? No? Good. Very humbling for me too. There're a few questions I'd like to ask you. Where to start, eh? I mean, we go back years. So much has changed, but you haven't. You're still the same venal, mercenary, soul-less philistine you were as a boy. And, just as in your youth, you confuse friendship with bondage and see financial transactions as acts of love, no matter how perverse. Such is your currency, which I suppose makes you a (deleted for legal reasons). All well and good, but you broke house rules and the safety word has changed and it's not "humble". This is what you get for taking the piss.

All you've done is refine your profound personality flaws and one-dimensional conceit into weapons using the artifice of business. And guess what, Rupe? It's all as real as a Restoration Comedy and the curtain's staying up. By rights, you should be lucky if you can have a dump in private. Your slimy tendrils saw to it that many thousands would endure just this for far lesser sins.

By way of a starting point - there are so many - I'd like to ask about a couple of comments you made to the Commons select committee yesterday. In response to suggestions that your company suffered endemic corruption, you said, "Endemic is a very hard, a very wide-ranging word". It is indeed. You continued, "That that has been disclosed, I became aware of as it became apparent." One would have hoped that you did.

Oh, another thing. Just in case you thought differently for one fucking minute, whether or not you "agree to be interrogated" or are "more than happy" or otherwise to do so is immaterial. Given that you are getting on a bit, time is of the essence and we really do want to help you in any way we can to reminisce on the old days. We wouldn't want you snuffing it now, would we? Just think of all the hard work taken to reach this moment. Rupert, if needs be, I'll donate a kidney just to see you hang.

I promise we won't get bored, even with the tedious little details about who signed off the cheques and to whom and how you pimped successive Prime Ministers into dismal acquiesence to the forces of organised kleptocracy. And just to pre-empt you, you're dead right, sport, this does all have the carnival atmosphere of a lynching to it.

More follows......