British Airways trade unions' eye-catching demonstration of live lemmings at the annual meeting almost didn't happen. The unions brought the lemmings in a bid to illustrate that BA staff should not follow the airline's management over the cliff to oblivion as, according to folklore, the small rodents are wont to do. But the demonstration only got under way after the RSPCA arrived to check on the lemmings' welfare. The RSPCA's officer gave the little creatures the all-clear but declined to comment on the conditions of BA's demonstrating cabin crew.

* The bunker mentality that is besieging the communications department at British Airways saw the beleaguered flag carrier yesterday restrict the amount of media coming along to the meeting in Westminster. Certain newspapers were told they could only have one representative. The last company that attempted these sort of shenanigans — and it too was (ill-) advised by City PR firm Brunswick — was Marconi. And looked what happened to it.

* Sir Richard Branson is still getting under BA's skin. After the Virgin Atlantic boss recently warned the Government against intervening to bail out heavily lossmaking BA, the flag carrier's chairman Martin Broughton spluttered at the annual meeting: “He is rather worried about his own airline. And he knows quite a lot about subsidies because he's been welcoming them into his train operations for years.”

* Relations between BA and Virgin are at their frostiest since the great dirty tricks episodes of the 1990s. Especially as current and former BA executives face court soon over price-fixing after they were turned in by their Virgin counterparts. Asked whether BA should co-operate with Virgin on issues like air tax, BA chief Willie Walsh flashed back, albeit with a glint in his eye: “We don't talk to Virgin...as you may know.”

...while Walsh is cagey over profits

One veteran shareholder insisted at length that in its accounts BA should split out its long-haul profits from its short-haul ones to show just how heavily lossmaking its domestic and European flights are.

Walsh insisted it is impossible to do this because of BA's large number of transfer passengers jumping from short-haul to long-haul flights and vice versa. And in any case, there are commercial confidentiality issues.

That was just before he wrecked his own premise by telling the meeting that the last time BA split out short-haul performance was in the boom year of 2005-6 when short-haul actually made a profit.

* Irishman Walsh is telling anyone who will listen that business class passengers have left the airline and won't be back any time soon. So BA will be scrapping its ambitious plans to run a business class-only service replete with flat beds to New York from London City Airport from the autumn? “No, we are going ahead,” says Walsh. There's some logic there somewhere.

* In these straitened times and with industrial action looming, are BA directors, partners and their children still allowed to fly free on the airline? You bet. When Broughton sought to clarify this, however, he only succeeded in sparking much unintended ironic mirth by insisting that they can only fly “if there is space on the flight”.

For the record, BA passenger numbers are down by around 1.5 million a year.

French say oui' to our top jobs

The City has long resounded with Gallic accents as Paris's finest bankers and lawyers flee the stifling parochialism of their local firms.

But it's only once you put them all together that you realise how many of 'em have started running our companies over the past year or so.

It strikes home when you see them all lined up together at this week's nominations for the Français of the Year award, where high-flying London grenouilles vote for their favourite fellow expats.

Under the categories for businessman, you have Xavier Rolet at the London Stock Exchange, Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye at Liberty, Tidjane Thiam at the Pru, Arnaud de Puyfontaine at NatMags and Andre Lacroix at Inchcape.

Only arch-smoothie Arnaud Bamberger at Cartier UK has been in place for longer.

* Here's Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas Van Praag, defending the bank from an article in Rolling Stone that blames the Wall Street giant for, well, most things: “To give just two examples, even with the worst will in the world, the blame for creating the internet bubble cannot credibly be laid at our door, and we could hardly be described as having been a major player in the mortgage market, unlike so many of our current and former competitors.”

Goldman was certainly a major player in the internet flotation bubble, though it may not have been the worst offender. It really doesn't take the worst will in the world to think Goldman was in some way responsible for that catastrophe. And as to not being a major player in the mortgage market — by some estimates it had 7%.

That's fairly significant, it just happens to be lower than some rivals. Still, if you work for Goldman Sachs, you perhaps get used to people assuming that what you say is true, just because you say it.

Rolling Stone, you will remember, thinks Goldman (which yesterday reported quarterly profits of $3.44 billion) is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. There's no particular justification for running this description again. We just like it.