Private Eye has creative in thei
For seven months now, the new regime at Sunderland AFC have been schmoozing the Wearside citizenry. They have done so to great effect. There is no reason to presume they have been anything other than as open and honest as possible on many issues, and have done so with buckets of charm.
I have never met either Stewart Donald or Charlie Methven. Perhaps their charm is only for public consumption; Mr Methven is a PR man after all.
There have been a number of redundancies since their arrival.
But they don’t deny this and there is no evidence that all they have done at SAFC has been carried out with anything other than the best of intentions. The love-in continues.
This seems to have irritated the satirical magazine Private Eye. They have it in for Charlie Methven in particular and are keen to stir the pot; using playground political namecalling to achieve this.
Their June 1 edition referred to Methven as a “Brylcreemed Old Etonian” and a “Thatcherworshipping smoothiechops” (and mentioned something called the ‘Sunderland Chronicle’).
They run a virtual repeat of the same article in their current edition, unless you consider “perma-tanned Thatcher-worshipping Old Etonian hooray” to be much different.
Private Eye, itself run by posh public schoolboys since it was founded in 1961, seems to imagine that because Sunderland regularly returns Labour MPs, its entire populace must be fire-breathing, class warrior socialists who despise everyone else.
This simply isn’t the case. More relevantly, while S v b t d c o