Monday Moan 20

‘Honest’ Harry

The producer of Match of The Day must have thought himself a very lucky man on Saturday night when he saw the dismal performance of Arsenal against Norwich.  Not only had he got himself a match that people would want to watch – small club upsets one of the big-time Charlies – but he had already booked ‘Honest’ Harry Redknapp as a guest pundit for the show.  What a stroke of luck to have 'Honest' Harry there on the day that his old foes at Arsenal gave such a feeble and embarrassing display against the mighty Norwich.

Notwithstanding the rave reviews Arsenal had received on previous MOTD programmes earlier in the season, ‘Honest’ Harry let us all know that the resentment and personal hurt are still as strong as ever they were during the period he failed miserably to move his Tottenham side above Arsenal for the first time since Noah set sail. Paraphrasing, he said that Arsenal were rubbish and a weak team and had no chance of getting into the top 4 this season. Of course, still essentially the same team that managed to rise from the floor of a 0-2 deficit against his much-hyped Tottenham side the last time they met, so much so that Arsenal ended up 5-2 victors that day.  That must have hurt.

Still, no sour grapes on ‘Honest’ Harry’s part, I’m sure.  His comments on Saturday must have been entirely objective, in the best traditions of a pundit with no axe to grind.

 

Andrew Mitchell – just a common yob?

So, after more time in the news than is often accorded to major earthquakes or similar natural disasters, Andrew Mitchell eventually succumbed to what he saw as the inevitable and resigned from the Government.  His crime?  A cynic might say it was to commit an error of judgement when there was not much else in the news to force the Opposition to concentrate on more important matters.

I am as puzzled as the next person as to where the truth lies between Andrew Mitchell’s very sketchy account of his engagement with the forces of law, order and security at the entrance to Downing Street a few weeks ago, and the apparent accounts of those forces themselves.  Mitchell denies the words attributed to him by those forces, but still felt guilty enough to apologise for whatever it was that he did say. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth.

But what are we to make of the Labour Party’s pursuit of this issue as though it was a matter of the utmost importance?  Could it be that they knew if they kept on about it Mitchell would eventually have to resign – thus handing them a ‘victory’?  Even though I imagine most people groaned out loud whenever Ed Miliband returned to the theme at PM’s Questions. 

And was Ed right to suggest that Mitchell had been afforded treatment not granted to a common yob – who would have spent a night in the cells for verbally abusing a policeman?  That always seemed to me a slightly ridiculous assertion – as a quick look at any of the many documentaries currently on TV showing the police in action would demonstrate.  These fly-on-the-wall documentaries charting the forces of law and order’s everyday attempts to deal with drunken yobs on  a Friday night, or errant motorists, or groups of young people intent on making life miserable for the communities in which they live, all show that you can get away with a huge amount of abuse and foul language towards the police without being arrested.  I don’t agree with it, but it seems to be a fact. 

As with so many things, the reality of life seems to be very different from the picture painted, or imagined by our politicians.

 

 

How could this have been undetected – Part 1

I don’t wish to say much about Jimmy Savile, partly because I know no more than you, since my only sources of information are also available to you.  I might wonder whether the level of ‘evidence’ apparently available today is very different from that which was available to the various police forces who looked into allegations whilst he was still alive.  I might wonder if the standard of evidence required is now much lower since he is no longer with us, and since he can’t answer back.

But my chief worry in all this is how this could have failed to emerge whilst he was still alive, given the apparent scale of what went on?  I know all about his good works for charity and how he was regarded as beyond suspicion.  But it also seems that whilst many complaints were made, nobody made a connection between them and so a broad picture never emerged.  How could this have happened?  Surely some of those allegations came to the attention of the marauding and insatiable investigative reporters of the national media?  Why was it that they did not pursue their prey with the same vigour as they would almost anyone else?

 

How could this have been undetected – Part 2

And on the same track – although with a very different set of circumstances, how did the world of cycling fail to find out the truth of the Lance Armstrong doping allegations after so many investigations over so many years?  It’s incredible that a sport so intimately associated with drugs scandals over the years could have failed to spot the Armstrong situation, given the amount of testing done generally and, specifically, of the man himself.