Pompous MPs can’t resist the spotlight

The marvellous Linda Smith called her Radio 4 series A Brief History of Time-Wasting. For a more exhaustive take on the subject, however, look no further than the experts at the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. They’ve been wasting everybody’s time for years.

And they’ll be at it again today, offering their usual forensic look at corruption — this time in tennis — by utilising the cunning process of revisiting every scandalous allegation they’ve read about in newspapers, or on websites, or seen on television. No turned stone is left unturned again by these super sleuths, ever eager to attach themselves to the latest headline, or the investigative work of others.

Perhaps that is why little ever emerges from these gatherings — apart from that time when chairman Jesse Norman clumsily contrived to out Paula Radcliffe as a drugs cheat, which she wasn’t.

Today the DCMS committee will be wasting the time of Chris Kermode, executive chairman of the Association of Tennis Professionals, Mark Young, head of ATP legal, and Nigel Willerton, head of the Tennis Integrity Unit. The MPs will be rehashing revelations about corruption in tennis that have already appeared on the BBC, the Buzzfeed website and across many newspapers, and will be asking the same questions as journalists have at press conferences, minus specialist knowledge of the subject.

The difference here is that, this time, it is the MPs who will get the publicity.

The shallowness of it all — and you are paying, by the way, as select committees are publicly funded — is underlined by the fact the committee members have not called on a senior executive at the International Tennis Federation. The ITF administers the Futures circuit where the majority of match-fixing is alleged to take place. The ATP has nothing to do with it.

Yet, as the BBC-Buzzfeed stories emerged in January during a Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open, Kermode was the most highprofile official to respond to them. Knowing no more than what they see or read, the MPs have called him, rather than David haggerty of the ITF. At least Willerton, as chief of the TIU, should be able to fill in the gaps.

So what is the point of it all? ‘It would be good for tennis to come forward to the select committee to explain what it’s doing to address these terrible match-fixing allegations and to combat the problem as a whole,’ said DCMS committee member Damian Collins. Indeed. except that detail rather seems to have been covered by the wide-ranging independent review into the TIU’s operations and resources announced by Kermode on January 27.

And here’s some other stuff we already know. It will be led by Adam Lewis QC, described by Chambers — selectors of the Legal 500 and the Top Silk Bar — as ‘possibly the only barrister in the country who has a singular focus on sports law ... he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of sports law jurisprudence’, and will adhere to the terms of reference revealed in a joint announcement by the ATP, Women’s Tennis Association, ITF and the Grand Slam Board on February 12.

The conditions laid out that day were extremely detailed, covering what would be investigated, who would be doing the investigating, who would be called to the investigation, the powers of the investigation, its timeline, the publication of an interim report, the consultation process, the final reports and the plans for its application.

The terms of reference and protocols were then fully published on 10 different websites, two legal and eight relating to tennis.

All that remains to be announced is the identity of Lewis’s two partners in the review. The rest of it the DCMS committee could find out with the click of a mouse, if it was interested.

But we know its interests, really. John Mcenroe with a cob on wasn’t as desperately attention-seeking as this lot. The alternative would be to stop wasting everyone’s time and money, get on with some real work, and let Kermode get on with his.

But where’s the headline in that?