With this week's news that BT is to buy mobile operator EE from owners Orange and Deutsche Telekom for 12.5bn, and that Telefonica chairman Cesar Alierta flew to the UK to persuade BT to also snap up O2, Marketing takes a look back at the corporate and marketing shenanigans that have characterised the UK's mobile market. Trawling back through the annals of mobile history in the UK throws up a veritable soap opera's-worth of incest, wife-swapping, scheming, rivalry and reconciliation.