June 28, 2007 | posted by Michael Baxter in IABN |

Gordon has gone straight to the top. He is setting up a council of advisors which is set to be made up of the heavyweights of the UK business scene.

The council will be chaired by Mervyn Davies of Standard Chartered, and include Stuart Rose of MS, Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, Stephen Green of HSBC, Sir John Rose of Rolls-Royce, Arun Sarin of Vodafone and JP Garnier of GlaxoSmithKline.

Controversially, the council will also be joined by private equity star, Damon Buffini, the founder of Permira. Private equity’s distracters fear that in including Mr Buffini in the line up, our Gordon is saying “private equity is here to stay and I am backing it.”

Also in the line up is Sir Alan Sugar. You can almost feel the press longing for the day Sir Alan leaves the council and they can headline, “You’re fired.”

But while GB’s GB (that’s Great Britain’s Gordon Brown), surrounds himself with the leaders of big business, small businesses are not so impressed. David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said, “Involving business is good … but I hope Mr Brown gets not just the views of big business but medium sized and small ones as well.”

In a similar vein, a spokesman for the Forum of Private Business said “It is time that we started putting the voice of small business to the front but at the moment it does not seem like the situation is going to change.”