The awkward questions still swirling around Coe

It’s the utter indifference to what the wider world might think that never fails to surprise you, where Lord Coe is concerned. MPs have accused him of being economical with the truth about what he knew of Russian statesponsored doping. Yet the first response he offered to their criticism delivered him an income. It came in his column in the Evening

Standard newspaper, which pays him, through his Complete Leisure Group, as a ‘consultant’.

Coe breezed into view at Birmingham town Hall yesterday, a few hours after that anodyne piece had been published — relaxed, no tie, top button undone. He’d just spent a morning presiding over an IAAF council session. that allowed him to characterise the parliamentary select committee’s work as a minor incidental detail, even though he didn’t spell it out.

‘I’m not sure that ever in the history of our sport — and certainly in any of my time on the IAAF council — have we made more monumental decisions in the course of one morning,’ Coe said.

One of those decisions — to keep the Russian doping deniers out in the cold — is certainly a path the limp International Olympic Committee could follow.

But the awkward questions swirling around Coe relate to whether he could and should have blown the whistle on the rogue nation, or whether it was politically more prudent to say nothing, as he sought a smooth course towards election as IAAF head.

Allegations about Russia were detailed in full in the Mail on

Sunday as far back as 2013. this newspaper was the first to reveal details of personal emails which also suggested he knew something. there were phone calls.

Coe says he had been out of the country when the calls came in — in Marrakesh for his sister’s 50th birthday and ‘walking in the mountains’ with his four children, among other assignments. ‘I tend not to go through emails myself, particularly when I am on holiday with my family,’ Coe told the MPs. He forwarded the emails without reading them and that was that.

Yesterday, Coe stuck steadfastly to the line that he doesn’t do emails or computers. ‘Look, if you don’t actually believe that I don’t have a computer and that I don’t sit poring over emails all day and that I don’t open attachments then there’s probably not a great deal more I can say on this subject,’ he declared. He has this way of smiling as he categorically refuses to engage in the detail.

More words tumbled out when he was asked if this was a credible position for the top man in world athletics, though there was no ostensible answer. His life-long professional creed was to ‘make sure the information absolutely gets entirely into the appropriate organisation to deal with it’, he said. ‘that is a fundamental principle from which I will never demur.’

He’ll be writing to the MPs to tell them that they were wrong and that they have been doing the misleading, not him. ‘Look,’ he said, in that way statesmen have when they are building into full oratorical flow. ‘We have a commonality of interests here. As a sport we want exactly what that group of members of parliament do.’

Armed with that vaulting superiority complex of his, Coe considers himself the only one remotely capable of delivering it.