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When Hugh Osmond and Sir Martin Sorrell speak, the business community listens. They are both hugely successful, having built numerous enterprises. Osmond floated the Pizza Express chain and transformed Punch Taverns into one of Britain's biggest pub landlords. Sorrell took Wire and Plastic Products and turned it into WPP, a global advertising and communications giant, owning glittering agencies such as JWT, Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.
They are the sort of wealth creators this country cannot afford to lose - modern, buccaneering and world-beating. Yet, at the weekend, Osmond, who now heads Pearl Assurance, said he was thinking of relocating the financial services group outside the UK for tax purposes. Last week, Sorrell said: "We will have to evaluate whether it makes sense to move our domicile out of the country."
The duo are the biggest entrepreneurial stars to date to indicate enough may be enough and they may do what would previously have been considered unthinkable and base their companies overseas. The question is whether Gordon Brown hears them.
Indications are that he has done and is considering watering down proposals in the last Budget to alter corporation tax. If so, it will be seized upon as another Brown about-turn. It will join non-domiciles and capital-gains tax as further evidence of a Prime Minister who clearly wants to do one thing but is forced into doing another.
And that, actually, is the point. Brown may climb down but he's like a recalcitrant child - he will keep pushing at the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Business isn't fooled - it may have won a further concession but it knows what this Premier is like. It's all too aware of what he'd like to do, what is going through that brooding mind of his.
In a sense, Brown has no choice. Britain is cash-strapped. Money is pouring out of the Whitehall coffers. He has to explore every which way of boosting his revenues. Every loophole, each chink in the system, has to be closed.
But he's playing with fire. When he was a student in Edinburgh, developing his socialism, Britain was a very different place. It had businesses that were rooted here, that were embedded in the very fabric of the nation. They could be pushed and shoved and there was little danger of them going anywhere.
What's happened since is that globalisation has taken over. That proud manufacturing base has been eroded and British commerce is dominated by services companies. It doesn't matter where they are located, where they call home.
At the same time, emerging centres are clamouring for their business. Dubai, Geneva, Dublin, Shanghai, Hong Kong - there is no end to the countries and cities that want to upset the old order.
It's as if Brown and his senior colleagues, none of whom are versed in multinational corporate life, don't understand this. They may call themselves New Labour but as far as big business is concerned they are hopelessly out of touch - and out of date.
Brown professes to be in step with the City and industry. He certainly spent a decade travelling the globe, attending meetings of bankers and economic ministers. He can meet and greet with the best of them. However, the impression is of someone who has not been listening and observing, who hasn't taken in the reality that London's hard-won position as the world's leading financial centre is constantly under threat.
In truth, business was always going to be more wary of this Prime Minister than his malleable, tactile predecessor. Together, Tony Blair and Brown were able to carry off a soft-cop, hard-cop routine. While the Chancellor stuck to his principles and lectured everyone on the need for prudence, his boss could roll his eyes and excuse himself.
As long as Blair was in No 10, business felt there was someone in charge who was on their wavelength - no matter that in No 11 was someone who, given half the chance, would like their bank balances for breakfast.
Now Blair has gone, Brown is on his own. And no sooner did Blair vacate the stage than his successor's true colours started to emerge. Under Blair, rich foreigners poured into Britain, attracted by the special non-domicile tax privileges. Brown went for them.
To be fair to him, the Tories said they were also after the non-doms. However, there were crucial differences: the Tories weren't in power and besides, he went further than they suggested. He followed that with capital-gains tax reform - again, a measure designed to appeal to traditional Labour voters opposed to fat cattery but ill-conceived in its consequences.
When business rose up in revolt, Brown backed down. The damage, however, was done: the Government no longer had a business-friendly face. Companies, too, have got used to reading the small print where this politician is concerned. So when the latest Budget disclosed the exemption from tax of dividends from foreign subsidiaries paid over to the main holding company, everyone looked for the catch. Sure enough, the Treasury wanted to introduce tougher anti-avoidance rules, in particular, levying companies' intellectual property or IP rights.
Many companies register their IP in places like Switzerland while enjoying the income they produce here. Brown and Alistair Darling, his equally naive Chancellor, at least in how business executives think and operate, can't let that be and must meddle. The result is a push against IP and another perceived slight against business.
Even an attempt to placate boardrooms by including in their administration one of their own - the former head of the CBI, Lord Jones - has backfired horribly. Instead of working with the Government, Jones increasingly gives the impression of not believing what he has found and of being implacably opposed to much of what is mooted.
Already, Shire, the pharmaceuticals group, and United Business Media, the publishing company, have said they are off. The latter neatly symbolises the mess in which Brown finds himself. Once United News & Media and run by a Labour pal, Lord Hollick, it contains on its current board as a senior director, Lord Turner - the same Adair Turner who is also the Government's pensions adviser and chair of its committee on climate change. Things must be bad when even your friends are getting out.
To Shire and UBM can be added a raft of companies that have said they may follow suit - Aberdeen Asset Management, Brit Insurance, Chaucer, Smith & Nephew, Old Mutual and Pearl and WPP. These are the ones that have publicly said they are deliberating - to them can be added scores that are having the same thoughts in private.
Brown should be under no doubt: he needs to stop pretending and start listening properly before it is too late.
