Quintin Jardine's blog

And hello to you too. Sorry again to have been quiet, but the bunker mentality took me over. Yes indeed, there has been lots to chew over in the media, but most of it has involved the failed English bid for the 2018 World Cup. As you’ll appreciate this has nothing to do with me as a Scot, so I refrained from comment. If I hadn’t, I’d have been reflecting on the quality of the advice given to the Prime Minister and future king that led them to throw their full personal authority into a process that anyone with half a brain must have known would be decided by a group of people, some of whose members make the likes of Bernard Madoff and Alan Stanford seem by comparison to be pillars of financial probity. If I hadn’t refrained, I’d have been criticising the BBC for only giving Andrew Jennings half an hour to air his FIFA story, when he has enough material for a six part series, and for timing it so that it could do no good, only harm. (Okay, the BBC is run by idiots of the same magnitude as those who advised Dave and Wills, so that’s no shocker.)  I’d have been wondering how many of the bid team have ever read his book, ‘Foul!’, which sets it all out, and over which nobody has sued, and how anyone, having studied it, could have marched straight into ritual humiliation with their eyes wide shut. When I’d done all that reflecting, I’d have come to the conclusion that the slippery Swiss Blatter and his disgraceful cohorts have somehow managed to steal the game of football from the people, to whom it belongs, and must be made to give it back. But of course, Gillian, that’s just between you and me. (As is my opinion that if Russia has a perfectly good case, and that if the thing was for sale to the highest bidder, they were always going to win that one.)