Quintin Jardine's blog

A couple of years ago, a large man made a resolution; he went on a diet and he foreswore strong drink. He stuck to it, and after three months the Big Man became the Thin Man.

Now I’m somewhere in the middle, and my regression has to be reversed before all that good work goes completely to waste, or rather to waist. The warning signs exist; I haven’t had a steak for over two years, but last night I had a hamburger, albeit a very good one, in 1869, L’Escala. So, as of today I am back in the old routine, watching what I eat, and most important, off the alcohol. I am declaring this publicly, so that any back-sliding will be seen as weakness, something I do not like to display. Regular bulletins will be posted.

‘Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.’— Truman Capote

No comment.

I’ve followed boxing all my life, and when it comes to its doings I reckon that I know shit from Shinola, as the very old saying went. A boxer acting crazy is nothing new; half a century ago, Cassius Clay, as he was, invaded Sonny Liston’s training camp and behaved so bizarrely that he planted the first seed of doubt in his fearsome opponent’s mind. More recently, we had Mike Tyson’s famous threat to eat Lennox Lewis’s children, (LL didn’t have any at the time, but it was a great line) and his use of  his teeth as weapons, but Iron Mike sold tickets and pay-per-views by the million so nobody every threatened to ban him. But the guy Dereck Chisora, in Germany last week? I’m not so sure about him.

I am sure that if he’d issued such specific threats in a British gathering he’d either have been arrested or sectioned, maybe even both. If that doesn’t happen, as it still could, it seems to me that the boxing authorities shouldn’t allow the guy anywhere near a gym, far less allow him to fight, before he’s had a psychiatric examination. That won’t happen though, since clearly the dear old British Boxing Board of Control doesn’t have any, not any more. It allowed Mr Chisora to take a world championship fight even though he’d lost two of his three previous contests. When I was a boy a guy called Brian London was forbidden from taking such a fight on those grounds, and suspended when he did. Also, the BBBC seems to have turned a blind eye to the fact that Chisora has a recent conviction for assaulting his girl-friend,  for which he is under a suspended prison sentence. There was a time when an assault conviction ended a professional boxing career, but this one, on a woman, didn’t even draw a reprimand. Nor did his previous, for police assault and possessing an offensive weapon. Normally, seasoned observers would say Saturday’s brawl was a stunt, gone too far, to pump up interest in a fight between Chisora and David Haye, but given the evidence of the former’s erratic and provocative behaviour during the week, and his criminal record, that may not have been the case.

As for Haye, what of him? First of all, why was he there? Answer, he had been working as a TV analyst during the official fight, (Yes, there was one, in which Mr Chisora, who’s a bully, not a boxer, and tends to come unstuck against bigger men, was severely thumped.) for a station called Boxnation. That is owned by one Frank Warren. He is Chisora’s manager and promoter, and who has been condemning everyone involved ever since, loud and long. Yet the fact, as yet unexamined, is that Haye was in Munich at Mr Warren’s invitation and on his dime. And this is fact too; if a proper, legitimate fight between Chisora and Haye ever does take place, Mr Warren will make more money out of it than either of the combatants.

Cynic, QJ? Too bloody right I am.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1460222470001/kevin-costners-remarks-at-whitney-houstons-funeral/?playlist_id=87937

Off to the Carnaval parade in an hour or so: a big winter event in L’Escala and across Spain. Think Mardi Gras on a Sunday and you’re there, only it’s a lot colder than in Rio and people dress accordingly. We had a  preview last night in Sotavent, as many of the participants arrived after final practice.I am expecting men in green sombreros, and at least one Jack Sparrow.

Personal experience has led me to believe that the world is run by people who have a very clear Plan A, one that invariably works well when the global economy is on an upward cycle and the world is full of Eskimos buying refrigerators, but who have no effing idea what do do when it turns in the opposite direction. In my ever-modest opinion, Ex-Sir Fred Goodwin and Still-Sir David Murray are two of those, big time. As for Always-Mr (Can you be stripped of Mr?) Craig Whyte of Rangers, he seems to know asset-stripping, sorry, company rescue, and that’s it; in fact he doesn’t seem to be very good at it. If he ever had a game plan, it looks as if it was shattered the moment that the administrators, men he appointed,  revealed that the Ticketus £24m, raised against future income, is nowhere to be found within the company. As I understand it, that sum is not a loan, and Ticketplus’s parent company says that it is not a creditor as such. Future season ticket sales are viewed as a de facto football asset, one which ‘Mr’ Whyte has sold, and which Ticketplus now owns, and will continue to own under any future restructuring. Two questions are begged. 1) Where’s the money raised if it’s not within the club? 2) Do we have an extradition treaty with Monaco?

The new manager of Leeds United? As just announced, Neil Warnock. Now there is a match made in heaven.

Thanks for that. These days we all need all the promo we can get. I’m sure that Hachette Australia will be grateful for your help. Promise; if I ever get to Brisbane, I’ll let you know in advance.

I’m pleased that The Loner worked for you. Yes, we described it as a standalone when it was published, but now I’m not so sure.

The sad collapse into administration of  the once mighty Rangers Football Club is a very large event indeed. Last night I invited my dear wife, a native of Tyneside, to imagine a scenario in which Newcastle United and Sunderland both went bust at the same time. ‘This is bigger,’ I told her and I meant it. I am no lover of Rangers, nor have I ever been. Yes, I recognise that many fine men have represented the club over the years; indeed I was at school with the sons of a couple of Ibrox giants, and one is a friend to this day. While its sectarian past is  not to be overlooked or condoned, there were many among its followers who stood above all that. But alongside them, out-numbering them, I have seen the arrogance of the others, I have heard the bile they spewed at their opponents in what is, in the words of the late Jock Stein, ‘only a game at football’, and I have witnessed the violence of which they have always been capable.

While it will be good for the soul of the club that it is humbled, as were Celtic thirty and more years ago when they failed to plan for the post-Stein era and became a shambles until they were rescued by a man who realised that any institution with a multi-million pound turnover must adopt sound business principles, it is to be hoped for the sake of the Scottish game as a whole that what is now conceivable, namely the liquidation and disappearance of Rangers FC, does not come about. No-one would benefit from that; indeed the nation would lose, economically and socially. But it is possible. Those who believe that the club is protected in some way by the ‘listed building’ status of the Ibrox main stand would do well to look at what happened to Highbury Stadium after Gers’ old friends the Arsenal moved to the Emirates.

There is no way out of this without the creditors . . . and they include all of us who are stakeholders in HMRC . . . taking a severe hit. I hope the administrators can achieve the rescue and restructuring that is their remit. They have some interesting questions to ask the failed management, that’s for sure. For example, why did they not meet their basic obligation to hand over PAYE deducted at source to HMRC? What did happen to the £24m that Mr Craig Whyte is said to have borrowed against three years of season ticket income? Why do its creditors include several other SPL clubs?  Why the hell was the club on the verge of signing a well past it 35-year-old for £7500 a week, knowing that administration was imminent? Above all, how did things get so bad?

All professional football clubs these days are ‘brands’ and Rangers, globally, are among the biggest. So why is it that successive owners of the business have failed so spectacularly to cash in on that brand value? I am not a big fan of transAtlantic ownership of British football clubs. Indeed, a green and gold scarf hangs in my cupboard. But one thing North Americans do bring to the party is commercial awareness and international marketing expertise. Is that the way forward for Rangers? Possibly. For sure, it’s a thousand times more attractive a prospect than continuation in any sort of restructured form under Mr Whyte and his associates. Dare I say this? Hell yes! Rangers need another Fergus McCann.

Thank you for your interesting comments and observation; I’ll bear them in mind, as soon as I can work out what it is you’re actually saying. Meanwhile, if you’re disappointed that you weren’t able to smack your forehead on finishing that particular novel, I’d be happy to do it for you.

Like many Scots, I woke up this morning to read a hysterical outburst against our First Minister by that clown among clowns, the self-aggrandising Donald Trump.

For non-Scots, this is the story. A few years ago, The Donald showed up in Scotland and announced that he wanted to build a billion-dollar golf resort on a sensitive piece of the Aberdeenshire coastline. He would create, he said ‘The world’s greatest golf resort,’ as if Scotland has no track record or expertise in that area, and as if St Andrews has no claim to filling that slot already. To the embarrassment of some and the annoyance of even more, the red-haired bampot was welcomed and taken seriously by our government. Consent was given eventually for his project, over-riding some serious environmental concerns, and those who argued against it and refused his mighty dollar, were abused, vilified, bullied, and threatened. Whatever The Donald wants, it seems, The Donald gets, and woe betide those who stand in his way.

Yet all along, there were those of us who know the east coast weather all year round and who wondered whether the geniuses who advised our new-found patron had done any sort of research into this aspect. If his exposed new course was to be enclosed in a huge perspex bubble, fair enough. If not, might it not prove to be just a wee bit too wet and breezy for your average multi-millionaire out on a golfing spree?

Doubts began to emerge last June, when The Donald let it be known that while the course would be completed, (in fact, that sort of project cannot be put on hold) the rest of it, the five-star hotel, the villas, Trump Boulevard, the timeshares, and of course the golf academy, would all have to be put on hold because of ‘the global financial crisis’. His announcement was greeted with scepticism,and even a few cries of  ‘Aye sure’. Since then nothing more had been heard until today, when the Great Man turned, without warning, on our First Minister, the man who made him overly welcome to our nation in the first place. His beef? The Scottish Government has been asked to approve a plan for eleven offshore wind turbines which, he claims, will be within sight of his golf resort, and offensive to  the eyes of his wealthy potential investors. That’s it then, folks; Trump doesn’t like it , so it mustn’t happen. In other words The Donald is demanding the right of veto over  Scotland’s renewable energy policy.

I’m not going to quote from his open letter, because it is too stupid and too offensive. It is also a front for the blinding and inevitable truth; the man has realised that his grandiose pipe-dream is destined to be a massive loser, and he has decided to cut his losses and get out, behind the smokescreen of abuse that has been his trade-mark since his arrival on our shores.

For an individual who claims to be such an expert in Scotland’s history, he would do well to consider the fate of Proud Edward’s Army, as he flies off, homeward, to think again.

Funeral Note, the next Skinner, which is due for publication on May 24, is available for pre-order on http://www.CampbellReadBooks.com in hardback at £14.99 (RRP £19.99) and trade paperback at £9.99 (RRP £13.99), post free within the UK. All copies will be signed, unless you’d prefer yours pristine. As my step-son Dom once said, in Spanish, they’re going like hot Magdalenas.

Poor old Harry. On the very day after his name was cleared after years of besmirching, he is about to have his professional reputation trashed for all time. Unless he takes himself out of the frame, or the FA does it for him, he is about to be frogmarched into the England football manager’s job, a poisoned chalice that goes all the way back to Danny Kaye’s Court Jester. (Google it, if you have to.)

The man who has just left the job achieved a better win ratio in four years that even the great Sir Alf Ramsey, but that counts for nothing to the majority, as represented this morning on BBC by the fat buffoon who is Garth Crooks, a man whose label as ‘a former footballer’ might be described by a crueller man than I as a gross breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. Yes, it was easy to hate Capello because he was Italian and  lacked the basic ability to communicate with his players in their native language. However it is undeniable truth that all of his predecessors, other than those who were short-term ‘caretakers’, yes, even the great Sir Half, wound up slinking away from the post,some under gross media vilification, rather than being applauded all the way to a happy retirement.

Does Harry really want that?

Jesus, he’s as old as me, and my application will NOT be going in. You see the trouble is, the England job is getting more and more difficult with every passing year. It has one great and overriding limitation under current regulations. These do not allow the British nations to hand out passports after ten minutes to any Brazilian who owns his own boots, as is done in the likes of Israel and Portugal. Thus, the England team manager can only pick English players, at a time when their numbers and quality are in what seems to be an irreversible decline, thanks to a corrosive combination of European law and the nature of the Premier League. Ask an expert (or any punter in the street)  to list the best players in the current England squad, in alphabetical order, and he might say Cole, Ferdinand, Gerrard, Hart, Lampard, Parker, Rooney and Terry. Of those players, all but Hart and Rooney are over thirty, over the hill, and will not be around for the next World Cup. Are their replacements players of equal quality? No. Is the current England squad in the same class as Spain, Germany, Holland, Brazil, Argentina? In the majority of those cases, no. Are those nations improving? In the main, yes. Can England expect improvement in the future? On current evidence, no.

Don’t touch it, Harry. Stay at Spurs, remain a folk hero and leave the likes of Shearer, Southgate or Psycho (but not Becks; he’s much too smart) to choose the vessel with the pestle, or, more likely the flagon with the dragon.

Following  the Redknapp/Mandaric verdict, it came as more than a small surprise to me when it was revealed that Mandaric had been tried last year on similar tax evasion charges and acquitted. Why was I so taken aback? Because the UK media had been prevented from reporting the fact, and the co-defendants had been barred from talking about it. By whom? By the court; that’s an assumption because I haven’t seen it reported as fact. At whose instigation? HMRC/the Crown; also a guess, for the same reason.

So far nothing has been made of this, and that astonishes me. It may be that the media have been overwhelmed in reporting the aftermath of the trial, and have had neither the time or the editorial space to look at this aspect. If so, I hope they find some damn quick, because many of us would like to know why the fact of Mandaric’s earlier acquittal had to be maintained as a state secret. Of course I can almost hear the arguments being put in court; ‘prejudicial to a forthcoming trial’ and so forth, but I cannot see the fairness in their being accepted. I am also astonished that the UK media, in its entirety, swallowed the ban and did not find ways of breaking it.

It is an established principle of UK criminal proceedings that the previous convictions of an accused person are kept from his trial jury, in fairness to him. But surely previous acquittals constitute evidence of good character, and it is just as unfair to keep them from a jury as it would be to reveal a criminal record. I suspect that the judge in the trial just concluded may have agreed with me, for he went out of his way to tell the jury in his summing up that they were men of good character.

There are several aspects of the Redknapp/Mandaric case that warrant examination; the length of time that the investigation, the conduct of the City of London police in carrying out staged, wholly unnecessary, ‘dawn raids’ at Redknapp’s home, and the aggressive attitude throughout of HMRC culminating in the shameless statement its representative made yesterday on the courthouse steps, with its final ugly, damage-limiting threat, that sounded as it if it had come straight from Big Brother’s PR department.

The only argument that I can see against such an enquiry  would be that the two men who were injured by the fiasco want simply to walk away from it undamaged, and to have nothing more to do with the matter. If so, after all that time, they deserve that right.

Congratulations, Harry R and his friend Milan M. After a five year  investigation that was fairly vicious at times, the jury made it clear what it thought of the prosecution case. So did the judge, from what I’ve read of his summing up. I hope that those responsible for  these failed proceedings will be called to public account, as soon as possible. Every one of us relies on the expertise and fairness of HMRC, and both of these have been brought into question.

‘I try to leave out the parts that people skip.’— Elmore Leonard

As I write this, the media is buzzing with anticipation of the outcome of the meeting between the England team manager, Sergeant Major Capello, and the FA’s suddenly emboldened chairman, David Bernstein. Will Fabio be fired for criticising his boss’s decision to fire John Terry as England captain? I’d  suggest that before Mr Bernstein does anything hasty, he should wait for Harry Redknapp’s jury to come back in.

‘I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.’ — Peter De Vries

Paper? What’s paper?