May 2007 Archives

Sunday Herald, 27 May

THE superstitious habits of sportsmen have always seemed to me a bit like, say, opposing factions in a war both believing God is on their side: fortune cannot shine equally on all now, can it? Add to that, we only usually hear about whichever lucky charm has spurred the protagonist to victory until it is fait accompli.

With such scepticism in mind, it seems a new trend in sporting superstition is afoot, one with potentially degenerating effects on personal hygiene. Last Saturday saw Stuttgart win their first Bundesliga title in 15 years after they beat Energie Cottbus on the final day of the season. How had they done it? Well, coach Armin Veh, not otherwise known to be an eccentric man, had refused to have his suit cleaned since the beginning of a 12-match unbeaten home run in September. No doubt there were sound footballing reasons for the club's triumph, but faith is a private matter I hear you say and if a suit can be of comfort to a man in this vale of tears, then so be it.

Veh could be on the verge of initiating something of a craze, however. Derby manager Billy Davies this week pledged to wear the same now rain-soaked suit in which he was attired at Pride Park on Tuesday night (as his side eliminated Southampton in the Championship play-off semi-finals), when he leads his men at Wembley for the final against West Brom on Monday.

A one-suit policy among football managers is not without precedent, of course. Throughout the 1980s, then Dundee United manager Jim McLean rarely appeared in public bereft of a peculiar blue-grey nylon number that was no doubt fashionable in about 1958. McLean was something of a poster-boy for post-war-type austerity, however. Even most people in Dundee these days can afford a spare set of clothes.

WORD reaches me of a lady journalist from London who last Sunday had her first taste of Scottish football at Pittodrie as Aberdeen wrapped up Uefa Cup qualification with a 2-0 win over Rangers. Hoping to avail herself of the catering facilities in the Main Stand before the match, the young correspondent, more accustomed to the rarefied purlieus of Broadcasting House, made it known that she wanted a "skinny latte."

One would love to think the mannie at the serving hatch gave the poor quine a good ear-bashing on fit-like fare to expect at the football, before proferring a nice cup of Bovril and a macaroon bar for her refreshment. In all probability, however, she was met with the sort of vacant stare most of us have to come to expect no matter what we ask of the gormless teenagers who staff football grounds these days. Supporters within earshot hailing from some of the more rural corners of Aberdeenshire, may have wondered whether the "skinny laddie" being referred to was in fact Aberdeen captain Russell Anderson.

NO lack of class in the Manchester United dressing room these days, but Sir Alex Ferguson must have winced when he heard that Wayne Rooney and his girlfriend are to spend the weekend in the company of P Diddy during the summer holidays. P Diddy, whose real and frankly much better name is Sean Combes, is an American rap "mogul" whose latest album includes a track titled "Bad Boy For Life." Ferguson, who once dropped Lee Sharpe the week after he celebrated a goal by grabbing a corner-flag and proceeding to perform an impersonation of Elvis Pressley, surely won't stand for this sort of thing. With Rio Ferdinand joining Rooney on Combes's yacht, however, the rest of us should perhaps be more worried that next season will see Old Trafford's answer to the Anfield Rap.

SPEAKING of Scousers, it was patently a bad week for the red half of Liverpool. Followers of the club who made the trip to Athens for the Champions League final had to endure a disappointing 2-1 defeat to Milan served up with some rather heavy-handed policing from the local constabulary. The whole unpleasant outing may well have left certain of their number wishing the air traffic control strikes which prevented some 7,000 Milan supporters from getting to Greece, had also grounded planes in Liverpool.

It is perhaps better, for the sake of peace on English soil, however, that they did not. The Rt Hon. MP for Henley on Thames Boris Johnson, a man with some previous in the matter of kindling fury on the Mersey, might be forgiven a wry smile at such a turn of events, but can we say with any certainty he would not declare Scousers to have been given a taste of their own medicine?

IN Oliver Stone's film Nixon the eponymous, and incumbent, president, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, looks up at a portrait of JFK in the White House and exclaims: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."

In the space of ten years, Tony Blair, on his ascension Britain's youngest prime minister in almost 200 years, has been both Kennedy and Nixon. The man who, on the morning of May 2, 1997, beamed from ear to ear on our television sets and spoke of rejuvenation and radical reform, has latterly borne the mantle of one who knows and accepts there are many who love to hate him. No end in sight in Iraq, the cash-for-honours inquiry threatening to leave an indelible stain on his record, the perception is that, Nixon-like, he has given up listening to advice. What certainly seems to have changed in the last year or so, is that he no longer seems to care what they - the press, anti-Blairites in general -say about him.

When they look at Blair, they see Britain for what it is - centrist, pro-market, neoliberal - and they don't like it. And some of them, naively, believe that once Blair, and Bush, are gone, and the troops have come home from Iraq, that neo-liberal interventionism will no longer have currency and that we can all forget about the threat fundamentalist Islam poses to the West because that threat will wither and die.

Well, it may seem like ancient history, but Blair was not always as hawkish as the doves assert him to be. Ten years ago no-one could have anticipated that his premiership would be defined by a war, on several fronts, against terrorism. Shortly after becoming prime minister, indeed, he declared: "Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war."

From the beginning, Blair himself wanted his great achievement to be public service reform in England - since devolution, Scotland has clung largely to the old Labour panacea of public services funded and provided by the state. Mindful of having left it late and perhaps fearful that Gordon Brown might quietly sideline the reform agenda when he takes office, the past 12 months have seen the PM go hell for leather at "securing his legacy." Having relied on Conservative support to stave off a backbench rebellion over last year's education bill, which gave secondary schools in England greater control over admissions and budgets, he has pushed forward the building of more city academies and introduced greater competition between health providers in the NHS, with the aim of effecting a service "driven by consumers, not providers."

The motivating force behind these reforms has been to make the welfare state more effective. Yet while the Labour party has always been concerned with social justice and using "the system" as a means of supporting those least equipped to cope with life, the Blair credo insists it must also promote and reward those able to climb the ladder of opportunity.

That essentially meritocratic stance was outlined as recently as last month, when he went on record to claim that his reputation would recover with time and perspective, adding: "I also believe that the essential Labour position, which is to get over the old divisions of left and right politics and to say you don't have to choose between a more just society and a more economically efficient one ... will hold."

Meritocracy, of course, means the de facto abandonment of equality as a political ideal. It means a smaller role for the state and a greater role for market forces - but given time, Blair's thinking goes, meritocratic policies may well be a better means of increasing social mobility, which is, scandalously, at an all-time low.

No-one dare speak of the "undeserving poor" but with David Cameron sniping at Gordon Brown over his management of Britain's accounts and questions being asked about the effectiveness of Labour's public spending, Blair's middle-ground "modernisation" agenda - hailed by both presidential candidates in the recent French elections - is likely to have a bright future.

So, modernisation was the big idea, but Iraq will still dominate the political obituaries. Britain's part in the invasion, hugely unpopular from the beginning, was driven almost entirely by Blair. What moved him? No shortage of commentators have imputed any number of cynical, sanguinary and imperialist reasons for his actions, but it is more likely that he simply believed, to the exclusion of all sense, in his own inherent rightness.

To fathom the origins of that moral bombast, think back to the early days of Labour in power. The party has won a landslide victory; the prime minister can do no wrong. Perhaps he begins to believe in his own legend; perhaps he starts listening too much to people like Peter Mandelsohn. Then Diana dies and he utters a few lachrymose words so dripping in hectoring sentimentality as to be worthy of an Eminent Victorian, but which tap expertly into the prevailing mood of emotional incontinence. In April 1998 his diplomacy is paramount in securing the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland and his amour propre cranks up a few points. There follows the successful military intervention in Kosovo, the rescue of Sierra Leone and even the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan post 9/11 and Blair must believe that the crusade to enforce democracy wherever there is intractableness to be not only right and good but his own personal moral duty.

In the case he put before the British people as justification for entering Iraq, as in his role in the peerages mess, there are question marks over his personal probity, but in the matter of deciding that the war was just, or even sensible, it is his personal judgment which should be condemned. And yet, while the Labour left, and the press - swathes of whom make it their business to beat the government of the day with whichever stick comes to hand - take it more or less for granted that the disasters of Iraq are to blame for the continued existence of the global terrorist threat, we now know, for example, that young British Muslims who plotted to kill thousands in the UK were being indoctrinated at mujahideen training camps as early as 1994.

We also know that after 9/11 Blair toured the globe in an attempt not only to drum up support for the US, but also for a Middle East peace plan and the fight against world poverty. In those efforts he can hardly be said to have succeeded, but his greatest failure has lain in not publicly challenging the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, or using his influence with President Bush to ensure thought was given to how Iraq would be handled after the coup.

Weighed against such debunked grandiosity, the genuine achievements of the Blair government - a decade of economic growth and high employment, the minimum wage and working tax credits - do seem slight. Perhaps he is right to predict that his reputation will recover, but the days of people taking his word for it are long gone.