On me head sun
IT WAS an extraordinary selfless act by a true man of the people.
Among the six-mile queue to pay respects to the Queen, there was David Beckham OBE, patiently waiting through the knight, sorry night.
The cynics described it as a blatant PR stunt by a man who knows a thing or two about swapping your entire identity for a brand and who was just chasing that knighthood that has eluded him all these years.
But maybe we should give poor ‘ordiefit nary Dave’ the benefit of the
doubt.
Who knows if he is not already planning his next act of solidarity with the little people.
You see Dave is an ambassador to the Qatari World Cup for which he has been paid the reportedly eyewatering sum of €150 million.
In a promotional video he even talks about how much he is looking forward to taking his kids to visit the oil rich emirate state.
Presumably when he does he will again choose to rub shoulders with the commoners.
That would mean taking a stroll around the neighbourhoods and camps where many of the 2 million migrants who make up 95% of Qatar’s population live.
Toiled
No doubt Dave will be happy to prove he’s a down to earth guy and sample the 50 °C plus temperatures they toiled in to build the world cup stadiums and new city districts to host the greatest show on earth. He might even take one of their 12-hour shifts under the unforgiving sun and sample what it feels like when the human body passes a ‘wet bulb globe temperature’ of 32 degrees as has been experienced by many of the world cup workers.
What happens is heat stress after 15 minutes, nausea, confusion, convulsions, unconsciousness, cardiac arrest and death. Essentially your insides boil.
‘Dave’ might understand it better in footballing terms.
At those heat levels experts recommend a maximum hour’s activity with 20 minutes rest during it. Not much of a match.
Studies have linked the death of thousands of healthy young workers from places like Nepal and Pakistan to this killer heat.
Of course the football fans in the supreme council running the Qatari world cup officially recorded one.
The fact that they don’t allow autopsies on migrant workers unless they die violently helps with their accounting.
So chances are come December we won’t see Brand Beckham in the charmingly named ‘Industrial Zone’ neighbourhood in downtown Doha where the hoi polloi live, 10 to 12 to a ramshackle hut.
He is more likely to prefer to walk the air-conditioned outdoor streets and markets that the Qataris have paid for to make sure their wellheeled ambassadors and guests at World Cup 2022 don’t break a sweat as they enjoy their stay in the gilded desert.
The heat extracted from these pampered walkways is literally pumped back into the neighbourhoods and labour camps where the workers who built them are forced to live, in a stroke of evil that would make a Bond villain blush.
Inhumanity
Beckham’s former teammate Eric Cantona has said he won’t watch the World Cup as a protest over the inhumanity at the heart of it all.
But he’s never got how to brand it like Beckham.
Given football’s powerful voice, the World Cup could have been a catalyst for change in Qatar, a state once described by human rights workers as a “country without a conscience”.
But like the Queen herself, Beckham has no interest in using his brand to bring about change.
He is the ultimate frontman for the status quo. One day they’ll give him a knighthood, for it.