Quintin Jardine's blog

Thank you, Brian. It’s a few years now since I visited New Zealand, and was touched by the warmth of its welcome. I still have trouble dealing with what’s happened to Christchurch; I really liked that city.

I have a friend who has Rangers Football Club in his DNA. From very early in what is now a four-month saga, he and I have been agreed that in spite of all the posturing by the company’s administrators, and their insistence on pursuing a Creditors’ Voluntary Agreement, liquidation was inevitable, given the size of current and possible unquantified debts to HMRC. Today, it seems we have been proved correct. The taxman has decided that such a deal would create an unacceptable precedent, and the CVA will fail at Thursday’s creditors and members meeting. The alternative agreement struck by Messrs Duff and Phelps, the administrators, will now proceed. Instead of putting £8.5m into the creditors’ pot, a mysterious consortium of unidentified individuals, fronted by Mr Charles Green, will now acquire the assets of Rangers PLC from D&P and will put them into a new company. But not, it seems, for £8.5m; no, the purchase price being quoted is £5.5m.

Why do I find that lower figure so striking? I do so because, by a remarkable coincidence, it is the precise sum quoted in the CVA proposal, as the cost of the administration. In other words, Messrs Duff & Phelps’ fees, which would have been met in full from the £8.5m CVA fund. Under the newco arrangement, they will still walk away fed and watered, the creditors among them the UK tax-payer, will receive approximately zero, and the assets of a global brand, with its considerable property holding, will pass to Mr Green’s unknown crew on the basis of a loan which the ongoing business will have to repay out of trading, with interest running at 8% per annum.

But hold on.  The assets of a liquidated Rangers have to be worth more than £5.5m. The administrators must know that, and yet they have done their closed doors deal without seeking other ‘newco’ bids, and with no apparent thought to the duty of a liquidator to obtain the maximum possible return to the creditors. This cannot be right, and it must be challenged, in the courts if necessary.

Trust me, I am no Bluenose. If this was happening to Celtic, I’d be saying exactly the same thing. If Mr Green is allowed to take over from Mr Whyte, the best case scenario is that things will have gone from bad to no better.

If it drives you round the bend, chum, what the hell do you think it does to me?

All us authors should love Amazon, shouldn’t we. It can send our work all around the world. I’m sold through it. Plus I’m a user, a customer; I feed the beast like everyone else. And yet, I’m more than a little uncomfortable when I do so. It would be fine if there were a dozen Amazons, competing globally with each other, but there aren’t. The original has established a marketplace position that is so dominant that if it were a normal high street trader it would have fallen foul of monopoly watchdogs long ago. But it isn’t normal, as my generation understood the word. It’s a monster out for global domination. In pursuit of that goal, it is now being aided and abetted by the US Department of Justice. As witness, the DoJ decided recently that in selling ebooks through Amazon on an agency basis, the major publishing houses were operating as a cartel, and so it came down on them with all its federal weight. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, will be laughing all the way to Fort Knox over that one. For sure, he is already chuckling over his clever little smart-phone app, which allows people to go into their local bookstore, pick a title off the shelf, scan the bar-code, buy it there and them from him, then put the poor small store-keeper’s unsold copy back on the shelf. If the good old DoJ saw any morality in its remit, it would have shat on that one long ago, but it doesn’t, and hasn’t. So you see, Mary, when you mention Amazon to me, you trigger all sorts of stuff.

Why no telly yet? That is a question for others to answer. (But taste and common sense are often lacking in the programme planners.) As a matter of fact, you’re wrong about Rebus. He’s disappeared again, maybe because Ken Stott’s been away in New Zealand playing a dwarf, but I do know that a TV adaptation of Ian’s Doors Open has been in production in Edinburgh.

My thanks once again to you and everyone else in the great state of Arizona. No, I did not have S23 plotted before I finished Funeral Note. I do now. I’m giving no hints, but you’re well shrewd enough to work it out.

Legends Football League (Lingerie Football League (LFL))

Went to Estartit last night, just after eight. We passed a bar-restaurant with an enormous Dutch banner draped above it . . . and hardly anyone inside. We also saw a dog, wearing an orange collar. If a dog can look depressed, that one did.

Reader concentration wasn’t my primary purpose in going first person, but if that’s what it did for you, I’m pleased.

I’m writing this in Spain, where the government is expected, any time now, to ask its Eurozone partners for financial aid to recapitalise its ailing banking system. People I speak to in Britain ask me what it’s like here and I have to tell them that I don’t know. My community is well away from the main cities and it has a significant and reasonably well-heeled ex-pat population, people like me, who are sheltered from the crisis to a great extent. All that we can see is that the property market is face down, or tits up, depending on your viewpoint. Yet as l’Escala’s many estate agents labour in vain to sell the town’s property portfolio, new cafes are opening along the seafront, which has never been better serviced, and they’re busy, not just with old farts, but with families from all over Europe. (It’s always half-term somewhere, it seems.)

How will it end? Who knows? All I can say is that it’s a little like being at the back end of a train, and having a suspicion that up in the driver’s cab, things are not as they should be.

I’m pleased that you enjoyed Funeral Note, and with the general feedback I’m getting for Skinner 22. As for your question, oh yes, Maureen, I know, and so will   you in a year or so.

I will Martyn, I will. As Easy as Murder isn’t hard to find already, and it will be out in paperback in August.

‘Every writer I know has trouble writing.’

Joseph Heller

Too true, Joe, too true.

So you’re hooked on Skinner? Not all addiction is bad. If you have trouble finding him in Cyprus, http://www.campbellreadbooks.com will supply anywhere that mail is delivered.

Hats off to the paradox that is the Scottish international rugby side. Unable to beat Casey’s Drum in the 2012 Six Nations Championship, Andy Robinson takes his men on an apparently suicidal tour of the southern hemisphere, and they beat Australia, on their own turf. Fiji and Samoa, the opposition in the two forthcoming matches, will be tough indeed, but at least our guys will go there with confidence restored.

Sorry about the circumstances, but I hope that you and Oz will have an enjoyable relationship. It’s over 40 years since I left the Motherwell Times. Does your uncle go that far back? What’s his name?

Having seen Grace Jones in action . . . Jesus Christ, Gary Barlow, what did you think you were doing? Why the hell did you let the lunatic on stage with the fucking hula hoop? Annie Lennox with angel’s wings was bad enough. Having said that, the whole Anglicised evening was the best argument for an independent Scotland that I’ve seen in a  long time. Apart from Ms Lennox, the significant contribution that Scotland has made to the British musical industry was completely ignored in the great Diamond celebration. With the greatest respect to Stevie Wonder, one of my heroes since he was Little Stevie Wonder, I must insist that Texas, Del Amitri, Travis, the Proclaimers, Emile Sande, Paolo Nutini, Aly and Phil, and many others, all belonged on stage before he did.

Looking at the programme for this evening’s Diamond Jubilee concert, headlined by Elton John, it occurred to me that, quite genuinely, some things go without saying, so I won’t.

Just one question. Grace Jones? Surely some mistake.

http://va-i-ve.com/htmlfilesen/homeflashen.html

Just had lunch there; chickenpig, naturally.

It took you a while to make it to Edinburgh; I only wish you could have seen it better presented. I’m sure Brisbane doesn’t have bloody great holes all over the city centre. Never been there; one day, maybe.