Just as eventually they’ll have to come to terms with divorce, women priests and condoms. It seems the one thing that never changes is their involvement in child abuse. It must be worth them formalising this by writing it into a canonical doctrine, so a priest comes out and reads” “Kiddius fiddlus our little secretum,” and makes the sign of the cross.No other institution could get away with revering such a record, or of choosing its leader in such an archaic manner. Couldn’t they be prosecuted under an equal opportunities act for advertising a job to Catholics only? Surely there must be Jews, Muslims and atheists capable of doing the work.

And there’s the health and safety issue of what would happen if there was a real fire in the Vatican while the cardinals were choosing the Pope. They’d all be screaming for help, but the crowd outside would be cheering the smoke and trying to interpret its colour.But this Pope could settle the social debate about what is natural, as ordained by God. Take a new born baby, isolate it from all human, and therefore sinful contact, and as it grows up, see what comes naturally to it first – transubstantiation or tossing itself off
More from Mark Steel. Ironic, really, that on the day a British chef is voted the best in the world by 600 of his foodie peers, Cherie Blair hits the headlines with her concerns over little Leo’s school lunches. The nation where a new restaurant opens every day is also the country where it took a foul-mouthed, cheeky young man in a television series to alert us to the fact that our children were being fed modified non-nutritious muck and that dinner ladies no longer needed to be able to cook. The outcry that ensued couldn’t disguise two important facts: the first being that school meals had been rubbish for years with few parents complaining, the second that we are still happy to feed hospital patients, prisoners and the elderly the same pitiful slurry in spite of Loyd Grossman’s efforts to change mass catering. From the outside, this looks like one of those rushed, spend the money quick before investors start to ask for it back, transactions.

Rather it’s about acquiring a promising new pipeline in conjunction with biotech research and development expertise.Well maybe, but if investors really wanted an exposure to Trans-thing-a-mejig, then they could have gone and bought it a good deal cheaper directly on Nasdaq. Ricard’s economic interest were of a similar order of magnitude, but as can readily be seen, he’s not exposed to anywhere near that level of risk. A good deal for Allied, perhaps, but whether it’s worth investors hanging around long enough to find out if it is also a good deal for Pernod is a lot more questionable.Shire chooses the wrong targetWith a tidy little £700m of net cash burning a hole in the balance sheet, Shire Pharmaceuticals has been priming the stock market to expect acquisitions for some years now. Mr Emmens was unable to say even what the scope for cost savings would be, but then this is not about cost savings, he’s keen to stress. On any measure Transkaryotic Therapies looks expensive, its chief executive has just inexplicably resigned, and it doesn’t even have any products licensed in the US, the country Shire is supposedly meant to be targeting.Indeed, the only obvious rational is that both companies focus on medicines sold to specialist physicians, so neither of them require a large salesforce That’s not much of a reason for slashing out $1.6bn. No surprises, then, in the fact of yesterday’s agreed takeover More puzzling was the target. Transkaryotic who?Matthew Emmens struggled to explain even what the US-based biotech does, let alone why he’s buying it.

Since few investors hold their shares for that long, the effect is to skew voting rights towards the founding dynasty The economic interest of M. Ricard’s family in Pernod after the dilution of the Allied deal falls to just 9 per cent, but his voting interest is nearly double that. Once friends and supporters are taken into account, the Pernod chairman and chief executive might command as much as 40 per cent of the votes.This might be considered reasonable if M. Pernod’s equity is made up of bearer shares, which in itself is unusual for a British investor, as the owner has to apply to the company to receive his dividend entitlement.Once registered with the company and held for a minimum of ten years, these bearer shares take on double voting rights.

Then, as now, he took on more debt than many thought sensible to finance the deal, but he made it pay off handsomely and now the debt is largely paid down.Unusually for a transaction of such size, the Pernod share price has been rising strongly ever since the company’s efforts to buy Allied first became known about, this on the theory that the Seagram trick can be repeated with Allied. I wouldn’t be so sure, and I’d certainly run a mile from the Pernod paper that is being offered as part consideration.By British standards, Pernod Ricard has a bizarre capital structure which even for those institutional investors allowed to swap UK index stocks for less well known and understood Continental equivalents, should set alarm bells ringing. With his acquisition in partnership with Diageo of the Seagram drinks business three years ago, Pernod’s Patrick Ricard has demonstrated that he can make these deals work. Rival bids shouldn’t altogether be discounted, but in practice it is hard to see who else is in a position to buy. Allied is too large for most of its rivals, which is why Pernod is having to defray part of the costs by selling some of the most treasured Allied brands to Fortune.