The utterly preposterous story of the allocation of the Football World Cup to homophobic Qatar is a parable for our times. That money, and only money, counts in sport – and in particular in the allocation of tournaments to country or cities.

I suspect that I may be unusual in actually having been to an international football tournament in Doha. Back in around 1999 I think when I went to the Gulf Cup and even presented a trophy (don’t ask!). I was doing my job but then, as now, football was no big deal in most Arab countries. You could only play in the winter because of the extreme temperatures between April and September. So obviously the country could not host a tournament that had always been played in the European summer. Obviously.

Not obviously at all. Insanely, corruptly and disgracefully FIFA awarded the Qataris the 2022 World Cup. Don’t worry, they said, we will air-condition the stadiums. Baloney of course. FIFA, instead of saying “We goofed” negotiated an outcome involving shifting the tournament to later in the year and thereby totally disrupting domestic fixtures across Europe for weeks. Money counts.

The construction of stadiums in Qatar has been rushed and deadly with dozens of workers dying because of inadequate HSE. And all for what? A PR exercise for a hydrocarbon rich state with more money than sense or decency. And the governing body of the world’s most popular sports was complicit in this unseemly farrago.

Simplistic and ignorant platitudes from Harrison whose track record over six years is deplorable. His newly found prioritisation of Test cricket ignores the fact that it takes two to play it. The cricket world has succumbed to the virus of T20 and not even the ICC calls the fixture tune any more.

Follow the money. A ten team IPL will be, by far, cricket’s major event. Any other cricket will have to fit around the money rich Indian domestic game. When, as is likely, the ECB decides to sell its “Hundred” franchises to the highest bidder it will be IPL interests who are first in the queue. So that will be high summer permanently handed over to Mickey Mouse cricket.

Well attended Test matches will be a curiosity in this new world of commercial short form cricket hegemony. A few heritage games like The Ashes might struggle on in the calendar but the players will perform having played little or no First Class cricket. The two innings game will generally fade away – uncared for and uncommercial.

In this new world very different domestic cricket models will emerge, all of them driven by earning potential. The best hope for County cricket is that it will be absorbed by the recreational game and become a semi-professional shadow of its former self. The short form franchise teams will attract the best young cricketers – there won’t be career opportunities in “Red Ball” cricket and it will become a part time pastime. That’s the dystopian future for cricket I’m very much afraid.

James Forsyth in The Times today ruminates on the latest threats to the Prime Minister. But Keir Starmer doesn’t get a mention . He should. Had he, as many in Labour wished he had, taken even a mildly anti Brexit line then Johnson would be safe. He could ride a white horse naked down Whitehall, stop to pee on the Cenotaph, and ride on certain that the Brexiteers would still cheer him on. But shrewdly Sir Keir has done no such thing. Give him power, he says, and he’ll “Make Brexit Work” – and given that it certainly isn’t working under Boris that’s a powerful pitch.

Nobody seriously suggests that it was Johnson’s deep understanding of complex political issues that got him the job. He’s a populist who wins elections and hitherto his buffoonery has almost given him “National Treasure” status. He’s not the deep thinking and experienced Gordon Brown type we really need to manage today’s threats. He parades his ignorance daily in shallow posturing, the opposite of a serious focused politician.

What next ? Search me. Maybe from somewhere a white knight will emerge to rescue us but there’s no real process available to facilitate that. Those in the line to replace Johnson when he goes hardly inspire confidence. Maybe cometh the hour cometh the man (or woman) but who ?

Danny Finklestein is of course right. Partygate is mind-blowingly stupid and the people responsible for it were unbelievably arrogant. But it’s it’s quite a long time ago now isn’t it? And quite a few people were involved including, it appears, one or two whose job it was to tell us what’s going on.

Those with the “tell the story” brief are called journalists. And yet we’ve had to wait until now to find out about it. Why did none of the partygoers blow the whistle – and much, much earlier? Why did none of the hacks see that they had a story? Was there some sort of omertà applying?

The answer to my last question is obviously yes there was a conspiracy of silence. And it held. Why was that ? People mostly act rationally especially in the golden halls of the rich and famous. The fingers tap the noses. Nudge, nudge wink wink. Don’t say anything old boy – mum’s the word.

And my doesn’t the Johnson Establishment look after him and themselves? They know he’s a fraud – how could they not know? But they also know he has patronage – a peerage in one pocket a well paid sinecure in some bogus public service job in the other.

Finally and perhaps most culpably they neither know nor care about the “little people”. The people with a much loved relative dying in a care home they can’t visit. Those of us who obey the law however uncomfortable for us it might be…

WE ARE THE LITTLE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND AND IT’S TIME TO SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

The chickens are gathering in the trees in the garden of Number 10. It was always obvious that once the effects of Brexit began to kick in the Economy would head south. The final nail in the coffin came on 1st January. We are now truly on our own.

Trade has been in the eye of the storm as the Government tries impotently to claim that bilateral negotiations with trading partners will be better than the deals we enjoyed as members of the EU. It’s nonsense of course – but that doesn’t stop them peddling the myth.

International investors looking at locations for a significant presence often put London high on their list. The City’s role as a European financial capital was genuine and something to be proud of. If you were a company seeking to enter or expand in Europe now would you choose Britain? Of course not.

London especially benefited from the liberal Freedom of Movement EU membership gave. Young Europeans flooded to the city contributing at all levels. Yes the waiters came to improve themselves, but so did the young graduates of INSEAD. We were the winners. No more.

Ten years ago as a Gamesmaker at London2012 I engaged with athletes and others from around the world. Without exception they praised everything about those Games. One famous French athelete told me that London was “truly the Capital of Europe”. No more again. 😢

If you are searching for a “dividend” from Brexit just remember this. Those claimed to be coming by supporters of a “Leave” vote back in 2016 have been proved to be a chimera. And in over five years since the vote the Government has totally failed to ameliorate the disastrous consequences of Brexit in any way. Every indicator shows Britain in decline. It was a false not glorious dawn.

There is an excellent snapshot portrait of the venality of the shallow, vain-glorious shyster who is our Prime Minister by Matthew Parris in The Times today. I watched the three part series on Sky about that other shyster “Sir” Allen Stanford last night and throughout I kept thinking of Boris Johnson – all mouth and no trousers both of them. But more than that of course. Stanford destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of his duped investors. Johnson’s impact on Britain has been even greater, and more lethal.

Stanford was an egotistical bully and so is Johnson. Both preened themselves in public where their arrogance covered their dysfunctionality and both were moral reprobates. Stanford’s whole career was based on monumental lies – well we all know that Johnson and probity never meet either.

It comes down to checks, balances and regulation. It failed for twenty years with Stanford but succeeded in the end though the dogged work of the Securities and Exchange Commission with the help of insider whistle-blowers. Here Johnson has managed to evade retribution most of his life and today the whistleblowers haven’t dealt the fatal blow yet. Et tu Dominic hasn’t worked so far because the Brutus is as tainted as the Caesar.

The Stanford documentary showed how the greedy, shallow, stupid apparatchiks of the England and Wales Cricket Board were fooled by a preposterous charlatan. And how veteran cricketers who should have known better took the tainted shilling. Surrounding Boris Johnson is another conspiracy of fools attracted to a monster by the offer of power, fame or fortune. It is a test of our national morality (if we still have one) whether, like Stanford, we can get Boris Johnson in an orange offender’s suit and handcuffs.

The Black and White Minstrel Show” was also a long running stage show at the Victoria Palace theatre in London. I saw it in, I think, 1970. I don’t recall any public debate about its merits. I was a Sales Rep and it was customary to entertain big customers at Christmas and one of mine asked if he and his wife could go to the show, I was happy to oblige.

It’s a bit of a cop out to say that the mores of the times were different – they were but that doesn’t justify the underlying offensiveness of the “Minstrels”. But in the main that attitude is retrospective. At the time my wife and I were concerned about going to the show because we saw it as down-market ! Intellectual snobbery on our part not racial sensitivity.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Britain was slow to adapt to the consequences of its post war multiculturalism and in 1970 there were attitudes and behaviours that would be unacceptable today. But let’s not delude ourselves that our present day society is as open and inclusive and tolerant as some would like to think it is. The happenings at Yorkshire CCC and the opposition to some sportsmen “taking the knee” are examples of the fact that we’ve a long way to go.

There is a splendid and positive defence of the BBC in The Times today from Tim Davie. As Oscar Wilde put it we always hurt the one we love, we don’t mean to but we do. Sadly some of the Corporation’s most vocal critics do mean to and one of them is the Minister for Culture, Media and Sport. And there are think tanks on the hard Right who have always had the Beeb in their sights. Then there’s Rupert Murdoch…

For me the BBC’s only present day weakness is some of the output of News and Current Affairs. There is more than a suspicion of peddling Government propaganda at times. Channel Four News has shown that you can be publicly owned and still independent. There’s a model there.

The BBC is astonishing value <50p a day per household. But the means of collecting this is anachronistic. You should not need to have a licence in the 21st Century to watch television! The fee’s one virtue is simplicity. But it is a regressive tax and a better solution needs to be found.

Happy birthday to the BBC. You have been a part of my life for 75 of your 100 years and you have enriched it immeasurably, at home and abroad . Thank you.

Matthew Parris explores good and evil in a very good piece in The Times today.

To say something or someone is “Good” or “Evil” is an expression of subjective personal opinion. It’s qualitative and not quantifiable, but we all do it. And we all respond when others do it. I might argue that Sir Tony Blair is a good man, and someone will scream “Iraq” at me. I might argue that Ghislaine Maxwell is an evil woman and someone will say that she knew her at Oxford and that she had many friends.

I think that we often use judgment to explore our own beliefs and prejudices. Arguably Desmond Tutu had a way of bringing out the best in us – our good side which may have been buried. At the other end of the spectrum there are people, some in office, who bring out the worst in us by appealing to our darker side. Most of us have one.

Religions muddy the water. Often hypocritically. I know of few greater evils than judicial executions – but there was usually a priest near the scaffold. The Crusades were carried out by self-appointed “good” Christians to combat “evil” Muslims. The resonance from that nonsense remains with us today.

Biographies at their best are not simplistically judgmental but it is hard if not impossible to avoid the Good/Evil debate in writing them. Truth has many faces and even supposed “facts” are sometimes obscure and always open to interpretation. Look at the debate about whether the Great War was a “just war” – that’s as binary as history can be. The seeking of definitive proof about something so subjective is a fool’s errand.

The metaphor may be a bit clunking but that does not minimise the relevance of “Don’t Look Up” for our times. The events of the last two years (I write as we are a few hours away from entering 2022) have shown (to coin a cliché) the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of mankind. When historians come to review in perspective the Trump years, Britain’s preposterous rejection of Europe and adoption of raw nationalism and the deterioration of leadership in all too much of the western world this movie will be a good place to start.

“How did we let this happen” is the take out from the movie as we see how six months warning of global disaster was squandered in a maelstrom of political ineptitude. The all pervasive power of the media which placed a celebrity relationship ahead of the likely destruction of Earth in its chat shows schedule rings scarily true, as it is meant to. Science is held in lower esteem than an image obsessed pseudo guru (brilliantly played by Mark Rylance). The experts are denigrated or mocked, even by the President who is initially more worried about the mid terms.

It is about the COVID pandemic though, of course, not directly. But the comet bringing the planet’s destruction is the metaphor for the virus. As with the very real medical emergency we are living through (or dying from) the comet challenges science and politicians alike. In both cases the latter comprehensively fail the test. Meryl Streep’s President has the image driven vanity and arrogance that too many leaders both sides of the Atlantic have exhibited in recent times. The slogans of the movie, not least its title , are eerily reminiscent of the pandemic related slogans of today.

The film is also about Brexit though the latter was arguably more avoidable than the comet and marginally less deadly. Leaders lie to us in real life as well as here. “How will this play with the voters” is the explicit question. Show is far more important than competence and expertise. The President appoints an aging war hero to head up a mission to destroy the comet – hilarious echoes of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove here ! A five star General charges visitors for free snacks in the West Wing.

Human frailties and inabilities to front up to threats, or to minimise them, are everywhere. Leonardo de Capprio plays the brilliant scientist who confirms the threat and he has a Peter Finch type screaming moment of epiphany when he cannot stand it any more. He’s seduced by the chat show host who boasts that she’s slept with two ex Presidents. A satire on the “we can do anything” imperative of the rich and famous. Shallow pseudo sensationalism which blows instantly away once the programme is off air.

The film is funny and quite daring, The satire is not subtle but then this is not a subtle story. We will probably say that such a threat as the destruction of the planet would surely he handled more skilfully in real life. But can we be sure ? “Don’t Look Up” ought to make us ask the question.