Fare thee weel, Baillie Bill Aitken!

Woe to all Aitken-watchers! The BBC are reporting that Baillie Bill Aitken, Glasgow Tory and MSP since the Scottish Parliament began work in 1999 will not seek re-election in the 2011 Holyrood elections. Quoth the Everlasting Baillie, "I don't want to hang about. Once you've done all you can do, it's time to move on. I've firmly enjoyed my council service and parliamentary service. But it's time to go." Poetic stuff, but hardly, I fancy, an appropriately eloquent epitaph to this estimable public servant. Having a penchant for profane and unnatural odes and ballads, I instantly commissioned long dead Elizabethan poet, Michael Drayton, to knock off a new edition of his famous poem, The Parting, to commemorate the end of Baillie Bill's penal servitude. Here is what the ghoulish rhapsodist threw together for old Bill~

Baillie Bill's Departing

Oh Baillie Bill, come, from the Tory list depart

Nay, do not stay, time Holyrood to flee,

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,         

That thus so cleanly we get rid of thee.

Packed off for ever, gone his baldy pow
Being just, Bill always threw the first stone.  

Old Reaction’s judgements are quieted now ~

Oddly absent Aitken’s adenoid moan.

Now at his last gasp of parliamentary breath,
Baillie’s pulse racing, Vainly the Lords lists he eyes,
Slumped on his bed of political death

As we cheerfully rehearse gleeful - farewell, goodbyes!

In time we might grow wistful

For Baillie’s one-syllable "police"

And recall quite fondly how

It used to rhyme with grease.

~ Michael Drayton, on hearing that Tory MSP Baillie Bill Aitken would leave Holyrood in 2011