Cursing Becks proves how ego-humping and corrupt the Honours List really is
FOR those who don’t know how Alex Ferguson came to find the word Sir at the beginning of his name, let me enlighten you.
In 1999, Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell had become so pally with party supporter Alex, he was his guest at the Champions League Final in Barcelona, and sat with the family.
After Manchester United’s dramatic victory, Campbell decided to offer him a knighthood on the spot. But he couldn’t get through to him in the ensuing mayhem, so asked his wife to tell him the offer was there but he needed to answer immediately as the next Honours deadline was fast approaching.
Fergie agreed, Campbell told Downing Street, and the knighthood was his. No wonder he famously uttered in the Nou Camp: “Football. Bloody hell.”
It was, as Campbell admitted to me, a PR dream for Labour, allowing them to leak the news and share in the vast swathes of positive publicity that followed United’s Treble-clinching comeback. Campbell would later call his quick-thinking coup “a very New Labour honour”.
As was Geoff Hurst’s, in the first Queen’s Birthday Honours List Tony Blair had control of in June 1998. Which came out of the blue, 32 years after his Wembley hattrick, but coincidentally was announced on the day the 1998 World Cup kicked off, a tournament which had captured the nation’s imagination, following the near-miss of Euro 96. Another PR coup.
The People’s Premier who had christened Diana the People’s Princess was determined to hitch himself to the People’s Game as it enjoyed an unprecedented surge in popularity. Campbell called it the “New Labour-New Football alignment” and the Honours List was their very own Ballon D’Or with footballers being used to disguise other gongs handed out as kick-back to party donors, retiring back-benchers and (eventually disgraced) City chums such as Fred Goodwin and Philip Green.
Over the past half-dozen years, with football eclipsed by other sporting heroics, goldmedal Olympians have been used to camouflage the kickbacks. Blair’s Ballon D’Or became Cameron’s Sports Personality of The Year.
So you can see how David Beckham is quite literally cursing his luck that all of his UNICEF photo-shoots weren’t done under New Labour. Because had they been, like Sir
Jamie Vardy and Sir Danny Drinkwater, he would be a knight by now.
Like the death of Little Nell, you’d need a heart of stone not to cry tears, of laughter, at the leaked emails which show how desperate he was to be called Sir David but kept being thwarted by “those bunch of c **** ” in charge of the Honours List. Just as you’d need a stomach of iron not to puke at the grovelling messages he sent to the Queen hoping she would personally intervene and take a sword to his shoulders. Whatever your take on Goldenballs and his Globaliconballs, I hope the exposure of his desperation to be knighted makes people finally see the Honours List for the utterly corrupt, divisive, palm-greasing, ego-humping, steaming pile of ancient horse excreta that it is. Especially those football fans who get upset when their hero has been overlooked. Over the years people have contacted me to ask if I’ll support campaigns to give knighthoods to the surviving Boys of 66, Kenny Dalglish, and posthumous ones to Bill Nicholson, Brian Clough and Bob Paisley. And every time I’ve told them those people may be worthy of wider recognition but I can’t help because I don’t believe in those cynical trinkets of empire. However, courtesy of Beckham, I now have a response which truly reflects how I feel, that I can quote without fear of comeback. In future I’ll tell them sorry, there’s no way I can help, because, as the man perceived as a saintly charity ambassador and all-round top patriot says of such honours, the people in charge of them are “a bunch of c***s”. Thank you, kind Non-Sir.