Rocket Club owner looks for a way into Tory good books
With the deadline for applications fast running out, Iron Angle’s Brown-Noser of the Year award seems certain to go to Birmingham lap dance supremo Allan Sartori.
The owner of the Rocket Club, in Broad Street, feels the need to cosy-up to the city council, having upset po-faced officials with an outrageous advertising stunt during the Conservative conference in September.
A placard draped across the premises – "The Rocket Club welcomes the Tories, there’s nothing Conservative in here" – did not amuse the Tory hierarchy.
To make matters worse, Sartori later claimed the club’s takings during conference week shot up by 30 per cent.
Now he’s on a charm offensive. Or should that be a smarm offensive?
Sartori, a director of the Broad Street Business Improvement District, has welcomed council leader Mike Whitby’s plan to launch a municipal bank.
He believes the premises of the former municipal bank, in Broad Street funnily enough, would be just the place for the new venture.
Fair enough, but Sartori’s press release continues in an astonishing mix of alliteration and toadyism: “The building represents the solid core of municipal banking, not only in Birmingham but across the land. It’s a magnificent monolith to municipal management of money.
“Councillor Mike Whitby bought this building on behalf of the city when it went up for sale a year or two ago with apparently no rhyme or reason other than the best of all reasons, it was the right thing to do. We now need to bring the full energy of this fantastic proposal into focus and where better than the former home of municipal banking on Broad Street.”
The missive concludes with this peroration: “Mike Whitby has hit a six with this idea, and for that, whilst it is traditional for leaders of Birmingham to get knighthoods if there is any justice he should be ennobled."
Good grief, is Sartori being serious or might there be the merest hint of sarcasm behind his comments.
As is well known, Whitby’s failure to get even an MBE never mind a knighthood is a sensitive issue with the great leader.
It will be interesting to see the line taken by the council when lap dancing clubs have to be licensed as sex establishments.
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Throwing a sickie, which Birmingham City Council staff seem to specialise in, could soon be a thing of the past.
One of the less well known benefits of the infamous Voyager IT system is that it will allow managers to identify malingerers at the touch of a button.
While in the past it has taken weeks, months even, to collect sickness data from individual departments, the performance records of every employee will soon be available in “real time”.
As HR director Andy Albon puts it: “The system has varying levels of interrogation with regular reminders to take action.”
That’s all very well, but Voyager can only work effectively if accurate information is entered into the database. If past performance is anything to go by, it will be a disaster.
