Tories waved through Saudi Toon takeover and it stinks
NOTHING has passed through parliament yet, but the grandiose claims made for the government’s football regulator are already falling apart.
Boris Johnson’s office is refusing to release details of correspondence relating to his intervention in the sale of Newcastle to Saudi Arabia. It could undermine our role in the Middle East, apparently.
So how does that sit with Tracey Crouch’s claim that the takeover would have been ‘stress-tested’ more by a regulator?
That’s just spin, isn’t it; or a lie, as it was known in old money. The government wanted the Saudis in, so its regulator wouldn’t have stood in their way.
And it would be a government regulator, not an independent regulator, because the slow-witted sports minister, Nigel huddleston, gave that game away when he announced with certainty that the regulator would hand £1billion of the Premier League’s money to prop up the EFL.
If the regulator was actually independent, how could huddleston know that? Yet huddleston was adamant. So much for independence. The reality is, the Premier League resisted Saudi Arabia’s involvement far longer than a government regulator would.
Meanwhile, the only person who knows less about the subject than huddleston — his colleague Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary — was making her points on regulation to the DCMS committee last week.
‘There can be no more Maccles-fields, no more Derbys and no more Chelseas,’ she said, as if the situations affecting those clubs were in any way related.
Macclesfield died because bad owners didn’t care, Derby are in crisis because the owner over-reached, while Chelsea’s owner became the collateral damage of the war in Ukraine. Yet in Dorries’ limited mind this is all solved by ‘a fit and proper person test for owners of clubs’.
And would that have identified Mel Morris, CBE for service to business and charity and the 268th richest man in the United Kingdom, as a rogue owner?
Would it have foreseen his mistakes, or the invasion of Ukraine, that spoiled Roman Abramovich’s sojourn in Britain? For until that point, Dorries and her party did not seem to have a problem with his, or any Russian’s, money.
As for the integrity test, Crouch still won’t even say whether the Prime Minister would pass it, let alone guarantee it would weed out oligarchs, or murderers.
The independent regulator is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the debate around football’s future, but remember this: it won’t be independent, and it won’t be able to make good on all these promises.
of course, that doesn’t matter, really; because it’s primary use is not to help football, but to help the Conservatives win an election.