The Paddy McGuffin Column: Only schlock 'n' roll...

It's the question that has dogged humanity throughout history - what do you give to the sprawling global multinational that has everything?

Well apparently a soft-rock corporate anthem, if private security's answer to the Keystone Kops - G4S - is anything to go by.

Yes, perhaps the most bizarre facts to emerge from the grilling of G4S chief executive Nick Buckles by MPs this week over the Olympics fiasco - if you discount the fact that the head of a firm which forcibly restrains asylum-seekers is called Buckles - was the tidbit that the firm employs more people than the population of Luxembourg and has its own flag and anthem.

Corporate entities have regularly been described as psychopaths and it is common knowledge that they effectively run the world, but G4S seems to have taken it one step further and actually thinks it's a country.

You'd think it'd be able to find a few thousand staff to cover the Games then, wouldn't you?

But then those refugees and inmates at private jails and immigration detention centres don't just beat themselves up. It is a time-consuming and labour-intensive business.

And when you're brutalising people what you need is a good, rousing rock soundtrack to keep morale up and remind you what underappreciated paragons of virtue you are.

G4S: Securing Your World, a soft-rock abomination in a country-tinged style, was apparently cowritten and performed by Texan musician Jon Christopher Davis.

Imagine Jon Bon Jovi vomiting into a bucket while brandishing the stars and stripes and you get the gist.

The opus includes such empowering and inspiring lyrics as "because the enemy prowls, wanting to attack/But we're on the wall, we've got your back."

And the buttock-clenchingly awful "G4S! Protecting the world. G4S! So dreams can unfurl."

Do you get the impression he was struggling to get a rhyme there? Flags unfurl, dreams don't.

But the sheer bombastic majesty of the following stanza knocks the others into a cocked hat. "Our mission is to maintain the peace/But make no mistake we'll face the beast/We'll back him down and make him run/We'll never leave our post 'til (sic) the job is done."

Or, as recent events have illustrated so amply, not even bother to turn up in the first place.

The second most outlandish element of the committee hearing was Buckles's appearance. He seemed to have had himself entirely laminated, including his hair which has to be 90 per cent polyester.

And what about that hair? Coupled with the day-glo tan he looked like David Dickinson at a Bay City Rollers reunion. Or Tory MP Michael Fabricant if he'd accidentally put his rug through a dark wash.

In fact, if Fabricant had been in that committee room the effect would have been akin to a Van Der Graaf generator.

Such was the pyrotechnic nature of the hearing he should probably have had a fire extinguisher and a bucket of sand close to hand.

But it would be churlish merely to deride Buckles for his sartorial and tonsorial choices, especially when there's so much else to deride him for.

With a straight face he told the committee that the firm still intended to claim £57 million in management fees for a contract it screwed up so spectacularly it made the Tories look almost competent.

Or it would have done if they hadn't handed it the contract in the first place.

And then of course there are those other contracts for privatising the police and the military, which are particularly poetic because it's the army and the cops who are having to bail them out. G4S: "Protecting its profits."