As he read his speech, crunching the paper hard as though warding off the temptation to improvise, it became clear that the text hammered out with Tony Blair's minions had been amended.
But the other issue to be of apparent concern to Gordon Brown and his treasury minions is not so much the level of talent fees paid by the BBC (although Jonathan Ross's £18 million probably didn't help) but the widely reported salary hikes for the BBC's executive board.
The only other comparable experience to politics at the highest level might be being the boss of a major corporation, but that person has a flotilla of assistants, minders, spinners, planners, schedulers, minions and an eye-popping salary.
After all, City bosses, Tory donors and rich men's newspapers have been complaining for a fortnight now at the populist attacks being made on their unjustified perks by David Cameron, Master George and their minions.
"They are Satan's minions and the TRUE symbol of evil".
But the government chooses the topic, the opposition must submit questions in writing the preceding Friday and ministers usually dispatch minions to read out replies.
It is a way of finding rare, disease-related cells in the bloodstream.At the moment, doctors (or, rather, their minions) who want to look for cancerous cells in a patient's blood normally use a microscope linked to a computer.
No one in the White House seemed to realise that the system its minions had been working on for three years was not ready for launch on October 1st.To fix this mess the federal government has now hired a company to co-ordinate the project (a systems integrator in the jargon) and told it to make the thing work by the end of November.
They include all eight military presidents and the top brass, as well as minions who carried out their orders.
But a modern-day dictator who ordered his minions to create a team that could beat Brazil or even play in their style would be swiftly disappointed.How to run rings around the OlympicsAgain, the comparison with the Olympics is striking.
Two of the men recruited to bring the bomb-laden vehicles to the site could not drive.When Ms Neighbour went to a pesantren, an Islamist school in rural Indonesia where the minds of some of the Bali bombers were filled with radical, hate-filled, ideas, she noted: "The green-uniformed minions reminded me of Mao's Red Guards".
