Of muppets and men

So what, exactly, is a muppet?

A small puppet of grotesque appearance, I believe.

The avaricious Miss Piggy was the most celebrated muppet of them all, and it seems reasonable to assume that her own unique brand of porcine glamour must be hovering in the wings when any public figure is described as muppet-like.

How, therefore, might we define muppethood in the context of managing one of Britain's greatest national assets ­ its pubs?

Lack of vision, I guess; silliness combined with pretensions; plain greed ill-disguised.

As insults go, I think we could run with this one.

Hugh Osmond, the man who wished to bestride Six Continents, considers 6C's present management team to be "muppets", but it seems to me (as it may do to 6C's present management team) that Osmond himself is not entirely un-muppetlike.

What, after all, was Osmond offering?

Lots of money to shareholders (and, in the long run, to himself); flogging off or contracting out the hotels; some financial sleight of hand for the pubs in order to improve the "targeting" of "capital investment"; and something vaguely called "better management".

I don't think Miss Piggy would object to any of that.

It's fairly obvious that keeping the trough well-filled is a higher priority than polishing the bar, caring for the beer, involving the workforce, or abandoning the wasteful, branded silliness of the last decade.

Indeed I'd go further.

When you survey what is left of Britain's brewing tradition, and when you look at the way in which the rump companies in whose hands the remnants are held are run, it seems fairly obvious that Miss Piggy has been the key management guru in licenced-trade boardrooms over the last decade.

I walked down London's Chiswell St the other day, and was shocked to see the redevelopments there which symbolise the final burial of that other great brewer, Whitbread.

Two hundred years of brewing, all gone with the muppets.

It takes muppets in the boardroom to do what Brakspear is doing with its brewery, once the source of perhaps the world's greatest low-gravity beer.

What has caused all of Bulmer's problems?

Muppetry, in a word: all that racing after fashion, all that addle-brained marketing, when an unshakeable commitment to quality and tradition would have stood it in much better stead.

Nor should we let Messrs Prosser and Clarke off lightly, though personally I prefer the more eloquent insult delivered by former Bass executive Brian Wilson to Sir Ian at February's AGM, rather than Osmond's hypocritical name-calling.

"What a monument to your chairmanship!"

Wilson said to Prosser, brandishing the 6C's company report.

"The destruction of one of the greatest companies in British commercial history.

Are you not just a tiny bit ashamed about this?"

As it happened, at the time I had just been researching two of the historical facsimile publications produced by the Bass Museum in 1977, one of them a book length description of the Burton premises in 1880, and another similar publication from 1902.

To leaf through them is to realise what a magnificent example of commercial creativity this company once was, how it provided the engine for an export trade which has now more or less entirely disappeared, and how it was it-self, the central pillar for one of the world's finest brewing traditions.

What has happened to Bass under Prosser's chairmanship was not inevitable, and the present squabbling over dismemberment is, as Wilson rightly pointed out, a sad epitaph, which Osmond wouldn't have been able to change.

And Sir Ian's reply?

"Am I ashamed of our strategy?

No, I am not.

I think it was the right one and an appropriate one."

Sleep easy, Sir Ian.