Salmondgate and the fertile plains of unoccupied moral high ground
Will the Prime Minister’s boast that he plans to ‘bring football home’ score with the public, asks Martyn Mclaughlin
The row currently preoccupying Holyrood is a complicated one – an understatement, one might say, especially if one has been trying to follow it in its slow progress through the courts and before the parliamentary inquiry that has been considering the issue.
I am not one of those who have been doing that – I suspect that very few people, other than those with a professional interest in following such things, have been able to master the ins-and-outs of this Shakespearean conflict between former colleagues.
Who has had the energy to do this?
So spectacular has this fallingout been that we shall probably need a new word to describe it. The ‘gate’ suffix has probably been overdone – Watergate passed easily into the language as a handy way of referring to a dark period in American politics – although how innocent and small-scale it appears by the standards of recent years.
Mr Nixon seemed a wonderful pantomime villain at the time, with his scowl and his colourful friends. He also had a tape recorder that proved to be equipped with a handy erase button. He deleted a lot of expletives in the course of his career, and gave the language the expression “expletive deleted”. Today, of course, nobody bothers with that. Expletives are, if anything, inserted, in order to establish that one is not out of touch with the contemporary demotic, which is full of expletives.
I have actually stayed in the Watergate Hotel in Washington. It has a special burglars’ suite that you can stay in – at a considerable premium. I chose not to. I did not find the hotel at all interesting, but I was conscious of the fact that I was on linguistically hallowed turf. Watergate gave us the opportunity to label every vaguely scandalous crisis as a gate of some sort.
There are -gates everywhere: in the rural part of Argyll where I spend a lot of time, there was a lengthy disagreement over a particular road gate, and whether it should be kept open or shut. The issue became almost as complex as the issue currently concerning the Holyrood committee, even if the stakes were, perhaps, slightly less significant.
The causes of the dispute became lost in the mists of time, and indeed at one point the gate itself was lost – only to be recovered from a nearby field. It was all very enjoyable and inevitably the whole affair became widely known – at least to me – as gate-gate.
Of course, the most famous of such disputes preceded all talk of gates: that was the fictional one in Gabriel Chevalier’s novel, Clochemerle. The casus belli there was the siting of a public convenience (there’s a coy term for you) near the local church, an issue so vivid that the word Clochmerle has now gone into the French language to
describe any intense local dispute about a small matter.
This current stramash, indeed stooshie (stooshiegate would be a good name for what is going on), seems to be another gate, joining all the other gates that accumulate in the process of political life. Everybody’s politics seems full of gates – it’s not just Scotland’s.
Westminster politics has had its fair share of gates (remember Profumogate?) and indeed had the distinction of having a castle in the Cummings affair (or gate). Some people, indeed, are so surrounded with these issues that they become a gate in themselves. One thing is certain: we have a gate here in Edinburgh, even if people have yet to decide just what sort of gate it is and who left it open.
Yet in this landscape of recrimination, of allegation and counter-allegation of the sort that politicians bandy about with such regularity, some rather interesting saliences emerge. And one of these in this case is the issue of forgetting. Is it possible to forget something important? Of course it is, and we should remind ourselves of that.
People can forget when things happened, how they happened, and whether they happened at all. There is a case for caution in pointing the finger at others for forgetting things, because even if we have good memories, to forget is completely human.
Indeed, I find it astonishing how much other people actually remember because my memory is highly selective. Like most, I remember some things with complete clarity – often things of no significance at all – while forgetting vast swathes of the personal past.
Public political spats often involve struggles for the moral high ground. This is particularly interesting. Scotland is a small country geographically, but the fact of the matter is that we have a large amount of high ground – and much of this is indeed moral high ground!
It is not for no reason that we talk about the Highlands – what we fail to say, in our modesty, is that those are, in fact, Moral Highlands – and we have plenty of them. Our Parliament, in its modern incarnation, has spent a lot of time proclaiming its occupancy of the moral high ground – sometimes to the annoyance of others who lay claim to that particular territory. That has led to continuing disputes over legislative proposals that touch upon private convictions, philosophical or religious.
Sometimes ground has even had to be ceded and acknowledgement made of the fact that there are different visions of the good, and that reasonable people may disagree – and should be allowed to disagree with one another. Classically, the view from the moral high ground is one of fertile plains of complete acceptance of the prevailing orthodoxy (as dictated by the occupants of the moral high ground).
Today in Scotland there is a great deal of surplus commercial property going cheaply, but there are also considerable chunks of moral high ground available for immediate occupation. There are clear opportunities to occupy this moral high ground at very reasonable rates. The application process is utterly transparent – so much so, that it is difficult to see what it is. Applications should be made by e-mail, but then, preferably, deleted.
Reasonable people should be allowed to disagree with one another, writes Alexander Mccall Smith
It is a matter of debate as to whether a Prime Minister who has been unable to guarantee the delivery of Percy Pig sweeties to Belfast supermarkets has it in his power to deliver the biggest sporting event in the world to the UK and Ireland.
The announcement by Boris Johnson that he aims to secure the 2030 football World Cup is a triggering moment for those of us unfortunate enough to recall his past brushes with the beautiful game.
There was the charity match in which he possessed the poise and gait of a runaway combine harvester, tackling Maurizio Gaudino, a former Germany international, in what could charitably be described as an act of grievous bodily harm.
Then there was the impromptu kickabout with a group of children outside his office, an episode which ended with Mr Johnson tripping a fleet-footed nine-year-old, sending him tumbling to the ground.
Where most politicians are concerned, footballing photo-ops are exercises in cynicism. With the incumbent of Downing Street, they are public health crises. Yesterday’s news ought to have the country reaching for its shinpads.
It is a crusade which suits Mr Johnson to a tee, given it is founded almost entirely on feelgood bluster and empty jingoistic invocations. He seems entirely blind to the fact that claims of “bringing football home” have done little to garner international support for past English bids, particularly among those nations who perceived such remarks as colonial tubthumping.
As someone who is entirely unserious, it is hard to know whether the Prime Minister is sincere about securing the tournament, or whether it is simply a device with which to amplify his boosterism for a domestic audience. Either way, it is marginally more plausible than an undersea tunnel spanning Stranraer and Larne.
If it transpires that he is intent on bringing the tournament back to these shores for the first time in 64 years, it is not too difficult to guess at his motivations. The prospect of a pan-uk venture, seen by a global audience of billions, may not be the subtlest way of asserting the strength of the Union, but given the Downing Street unit tasked with doing the same has undergone more line-up changes than The Sugababes, it may be the least worst option.
Mr Johnson is also opportunistic enough to realise that, if successful, a World Cup on British soil may be one of the few notable legacies he is capable of delivering in his premiership. The problem is that, where the World Cup is concerned, such legacies are always contested.
There can be no doubt that at its best, the tournament is a spectacle capable of grand narratives and moments of individual glory and it would be hugely inspirational for a generation of young athletes to witness the world’s greatest players up close and personal.
A bid from across the UK and Ireland, where there are plenty of modern stadia, would also largely negate the danger of white elephant infrastructure, and the vast capital expenditure they entail. In this respect, the technical excellence of any future and UK and Ireland bid would be assured.
Yet the criteria by which World Cups are awarded is never so straightforward. It may remain a shining beacon of sporting excellence, but the actual institution of the tournament has seen its lustre dulled by repeated scandals, and primarily serves as a vehicle for commercial interests and soft power.
Perhaps that is the point. Maybe Mr
Johnson’s renewed interest in a bid belies his determination to reset global perceptions of post-brexit Britain. After all, if the Russians and Qataris were permitted to use the World Cup for a spot of reputation laundering, Team GB can have its turn.
He and his Cabinet certainly pose a formidable starting XI capable of rivalling anyone when it comes to the real test of a host nation – its capacity for the backroom wooing of potential suitors.
Memories are still fresh from England’s attempts to host the 2018 iteration of the tourney, an effort which saw it enlist the likes of David Beckham, the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Charles as bid ambassadors, only to see Vladimir Putin swoop into Zurich and claim the prize.
Some two years were spent on that failed bid – along with the not inconsiderable sum of £19 million – only for Fifa’s executive committee to look east. More than half of the figures involved in the vote have since been banned from the sport or otherwise discredited.
In the end, the price of the English bid was even higher, thanks to the grim spectacle of subservience which saw Qatar's Mohammed bin Hammam invited to Downing Street and Windsor Castle, and the shameless courting of Jack Warner, the then vice-president of Fifa, who has since been banned from taking part in any football-related activity for life.
For its part, UK Sport has defended the idea of bidding yet again to host the tournament, insisting that that Fifa’s process has changed, and is now “a lot more transparent”. Given it could not have been any less so, this is not exactly the ringing endorsement it might appear, though it is true that progress has been made, with Fifa ceding power from its cabal of executives to the 211-strong congress of its member nations.
It would be short-sighted, however, to ignore serious questions which remain about the complete lack of oversight of Fifa’s decisionmaking processes. Indeed, it was Fifa’s own ethics committee which retrospectively assessed the decision to award consecutive World Cups to Russia and Qatar, only to conclude that the procedures in place were “well thought out, robust, and professional”.
This is the kind of bravado of which Mr Johnson would be proud. Time will tell if his bid has legs. The 2030 host will not be decided for another three years. In the meantime, it might be best to keep a bucket and sponge at the ready.