Quintin Jardine's blog

I believe it’s Christmas next week. Bugger. Bah. Humbug.

I can appreciate that night happen if you read the series out of sequence, but the latest Skinner will always tell you where big Bob is at. The next one’s going to do even better. It’ll tell you where he was at fifteen years ago. You’ll get to know him a lot better as well, and to uncover quite a few secrets that lie hidden in his past.

While most of the rest of Britain were watching a young man achieve his lifetime goal, my telly was on another channel watching a God-given talent that’s above and beyond anything Simon Cowell ever produced. A few years back, Bill Massey, my  then editor, a West Ham nut, told me that there was nothing he enjoyed more than watching Paolo di Canio just pissing about. But not even Paolo, that great eccentric, could generate the sheer pleasure that’s to be gained these days by watching Lionel Messi when he’s given free rein by Barcelona, ‘mes que un club’, to express himself. The lad is so extravagantly gifted that he makes me laugh with admiration, and no other footballer has ever done that. Best of all, unlike so many others in his sport, he does it with a smile on his face.

I believe that something called The X Factor, came to an end last night and that 20 million UK viewers tuned in to ITV to watch the final. I know very little about the X Factor, beyond what I see in headlines, but my impression from those is that its purpose is to give the mainly mediocre their five minutes of fame, and that it pulls in viewers by relentless promotion and by letting its judges get confrontational. That’s right, same as ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, but less posh. Seems to work, though; if it pulls one third of the British population then it must generate mountainous advertising revenue, and ITV surely needs the money.

Not an auspicious start for the new Aberdeen management team. I wonder if Craig and Archie will have third thoughts.

I subscribe to just about every available football channel on TV. This includes ESPN, but there I am a reluctant customer, and I might even chuck it. Why? Because of their commentator, one John Champion. He may be the humanitarian of  the year in private, he may be great company in the pub. But I’m afraid there’s something about his style that sets me off. I sense a sneer in everything he says, the tone of a true smart arse, and you know what they say about them. It would be fine if he’d stick to football, but he doesn’t seem capable of describing a game without interspersing his commentary with snide, irrelevant and unnecessary comments. He reached a nadir yesterday when, during a game, he picked out one particular player (No, not Joey Barton) and told his audience that he had been ‘ a bad lad’ and that he had spent some time in a young offenders’ institution. I didn’t know that, and I doubt if many other viewers did either. I don’t know either, why Mr Champion chose to mention it. I’ve since checked on it. Yes, it was a serious offence, but the individual was punished. He might have gone out of the game, but his present employers saw good in him, and now he’s getting on with his life; or he was until a knobhead with a microphone dug out his past and broadcast it to the nation. ESPN is a respected broadcaster, but it’s being brought into disrepute; it should do something about it.

Oh yes, Chris, I knew your father. Allan and I were colleagues in the 1970s: a man who was universally liked and who’s still mourned by everyone who knew him. He had a fund of stories, including one about a popular entertainer of the time who visited his restaurant, and . . . here I quote . . . ‘Took my breath away.’ You had to listen to him all the time, in case a great one-liner slipped past. The last time I saw him was at the signing table at the Edinburgh Book Festival; you might even have been with him. Lovely man; God bless him

I don’t feel bad at all about 2018. I do feel bad about the FIFA crew, and wish that the football associations of the ‘major’ countries had the courage and motivation to flush the shysters out of there. Maybe there’s a nearby river that can be rerouted, for that’s what it might take. As for 2022, you Aussies had a much better case than Qatar. If Israel qualify, it’s going to have to amend its laws to allow its team and supporters into their country. The very fact that it have such a law should have disqualified its bid from ever being heard. That, and the fact that if your average Qatari was given a football he would either try to eat it or would confuse the life out of himself trying to find the control buttons. And speaking of buttons, don’t write off your cricket side. Without being anti-English in any way, (I married one while in full possession of my senses.) you should realise that your visitors have one of their own; it’s labelled ‘self-destruct’, and sometimes it goes off of its own accord. It ain’t over till the fat umpire sings. You ask my pal from Bradford; he’ll back me up.

Sorry to be football obsessed, but that’s the way I am. I noted the following in Henry Winter’s Telegraph story on the Alan Pardew press conference following his unveiling as manager of Newcastle United:

‘It’s a shame this London connection is thrown at me. I do not consider myself ‘London’. I managed last at Southampton and I live in Surrey.”

I feel sad for Mr Pardew. To the northerner, Surrey is a suburb of London and Southampton is somewhere next door, just as Londoners often think nothing of asking colleagues in Edinburgh or Glasgow to ‘pop along to Aberdeen’. Football managers step into dead men’s shoes; it’s the nature of the game. But to do so with such a lack of understanding of the place to which he’s going, that’s almost suicidal. Not surprising though; his entire football career as player and manager has taken him no further north than Crystal Palace.

I hope Pardew succeeds, I really do, even though my step-son is a Sunderland supporter. I just don’t believe he’s the man for the job; nor do 98% of the club’s supporters, as polled by the local newspaper. He is one of nature’s Reading, or West Ham, managers, going to a club that needs someone with Man U qualities. His respected predecessor, Chris Hughton, might not have been that man, but at least he’s spent his entire career at assistant/caretaker level at big clubs, and had a decent record throughout. If Mike Ashley, the club’s owner, was determined to get rid of him, be should have gone poaching and hired Owen Coyle. Little wonder that Ashley, lacked the courage to sit beside his new employee as he faced the media, leaving him instead to take the flak alone.

Skip back two posts, to the one headed ‘Hands off!!!’ and read the last sentence. Once you have, you’ll realise why I’m not surprised to have learned that 70-year-old (as he hates to be called) Craig Brown has resigned as manager of Motherwell FC, and seems about to accept the task of leading Aberdeen out of the SPL. I take this as renewed proof of a theory of mine that football management is about ego, far more so than money or anything else. It is also incontrovertible verification of one of life’s great maxims, that there is no  fool like an old fool.

If I was a Westminster MP, I’d have voted against the increase in university tuition fees that our Parliament passed this evening. As an elector I’m going to want to know how my local MP voted . . . although since I live in the champagne socialist republic of East Lothian I’m pretty sure how she did. However that does not mean that I approve for one second of any of the stuff that went on in London this evening in the guise of protest, anarchic conduct so violent that TV reporters were forced to wear hard hats, as if they were in a war zone. I can only hope that every person convicted of offences committed in these riots is banned from ever setting foot in a British university again, even after they’ve done the lengthy stretches which are warranted. Let the punishment fit the crime.

What is it about Aberdeen Football Club? Eighteen months ago, they lured away with untold blandishments, one Mark McGhee, then manager of Motherwell, the team that both Bob Skinner and I support, as a result of boyhood curses upon us. Maybe they did us a favour, for things didn’t work out so well for Mark at chilly Pittodrie,and a couple of weeks ago, he received the football manager’s traditional reward, his P45. So what have they done now, these gentlemen with delusions of adequacy? They’ve only gone and tapped up the venerable duo who are currently enjoying great success at Fir Park, having led the club into Europe last season and this year being well placed to finish third, in other words to win the real Scottish Premier League, the one that’s unconnected with the mini-league that Rangers and Celtic contest between them. Craig Brown and his assistant Archie Knox are probably the most senior management team in British football. Craig is a respected figure, a former national team manager in an era when we actually qualified for the finals of major tournaments. He is also 70 years old, even older than Sir Alex, even older than me, and Archie isn’t far behind him in the years department.

So what is it with the Aberdeen chairman that makes him imagine that our Craig and Archie would have the slightest interest in leaving a currently successful club, for one which is just as starved of resources and which is currently propping up the league. Beats me. So far the signs are that it beats Craig and Archie as well. Let’s hope it stays that way, for as Mr Mike Ashley has proved at Newcastle, logic, common sense, and a few other things as well have no place in modern football.

I’ve been known to suggest on public platforms that man’s three greatest inventions have been, chronologically, the wheel, the condom and the internet. But when great inventions become universally available, great danger can follow. For example, the first has carried many a hostile force into peaceful territory, while the second lulls users into a sense of security that can sometimes be false. The third? In a word, Wikileaks. I’m all for freedom of information, but I’m also for realism when it comes to national security. It’s not up to individuals to decide what secrets a state keeps, it’s a matter for the government of that state. If  the majority want to change that policy, then it’s up to them to change the government if necessary.

If a guy like Julian Assange, a convicted computer hacker, is given material that he knows is restricted and must have been obtained illegally, and chooses to circulate it on his website, regardless of the consequences for the states, organisations and individuals affected without editing or discriminating, what does that make him? Some would say it makes him a terrorist. I have sympathy with that view, but I’d prefer to suggest that his disregard for national and individual rights to privacy, and most particularly for any statutes that protect them, is best described as the behaviour of an outlaw. But not the Robin Hood type, not a socialist with a bow and arrow; oh no, he’s a highwayman, pure Dick Turpin, pure Billy the Kid, completely ruthless in his readiness to appropriate the property of others. There’s nothing romantic about this guy. Most countries have data protection legislation to stop people like him. Yet look what’s happened since he’s been arrested. Regardless of the fact that the charges he’s facing have nothing to do with the Wikileaks operation, his followers, his acolytes, his would-be merry ****ing men, are launching cyber attacks on organisations they perceive to be ‘the enemy’.

In my eyes, (maybe my site will be attacked for my saying this) they really are terrorists, and it’s time that national governments joined forces to shit on them from a very great height.

Managed to move the car this afternoon; neither of us enjoyed it. But still, it’s progress.

Weirdest thing. It;’s minus something outside just now, and I’m in my office: ten minutes ago I heard a buzz, turned around and there was a wasp crawling up one of my blinds. Dunno what the hell it thought it was at. Sadly I can no longer ask it. I have a large halogen uplighter, and the silly bugger flew into it. Ever wonder what cremating wasp smells like? Answer: Bad.

That is a very kind and thoughtful question, Mary. The answer is that we are quite happy with the principle which Amazon applies to its Kindle sales, and with the terms.

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.)

Good question, but in fact the boy Oz did not meet his end in any book. He perished, in slightly mysterious circumstances, somewhere between the end of the prophetically titled For the Death of Me, and the beginning of Inhuman Remains, in which his erstwhile partner/nemesis Primavera strikes out on her own.

I’ve been absent without leave for a while.  Blame it on the snow; I’ve been pretty much village-bound for the last ten days, and I’m beginning to take it personally. I’ve lived in Gullane for six months short of forty years, and I’ve never known a stretch of weather like this. Yet it isn’t the worst I’ve experienced, not even this year; it was worse in March in Spain, the day that a metre of snow fell in four hours, taking out the power supply in the process.

Still, it’s bad enough. It’s around freezing point outside, for all that the sun is shining through the icicles. I’ve just seen the faintest ripple of movement in a branch. Could that be the first sign of a breeze that will bring the promised thaw? Maybe, let’s hope so; but even if it is, things aren’t going to get back to normal in a hurry. The conditions have been so widespread that the local highways department has been able to do no more than clear the main roads. The pavements are lethal, but you’d better not fall over and break anything, for you’ll have to wait a while for an ambulance. It’s easy to feel neglected. I’ve succumbed myself once or twice. But reasonable consideration makes me acknowledge that councils can only make reasonable provision for potential adverse weather and that every so often, be it once in a lifetime, things are going to happen that will overwhelm us for a while. Shit happens.

However bad things get though, they won’t stop politicians behaving like politicians. I read today that opposition members in  the Scottish Parliament are attacking the Transport Minister’s response to the roads situation. What do they expect the guy to do? Overfly the M8 breathing  fire on the ice? Do a Boromir and clear snowdrifts with his arms? Do these clowns believe that Santa really does visit every child in the land in the early hours of December 25? (Not that I’m saying he doesn’t, kids.) Or is it simply that they are so venal and opportunistic that they will use what has been, let’s face it, a public disaster, to serve their own narrow, selfish interests?

Over two evenings, I’ve just watched a BBC4 film on ‘the real’ Peter Mandelson. Now I find myself wondering whether we’ve seen the last of him in Labour politics. After all, he was born to them; Herbert Morrison, his grandfather was Attlee’s deputy PM for the six years of his government, so his party is in his genes. It seems that Ed Milipede doesn’t seem to like him, and he may suffer for it. I don’t see anyone in his team who has the faintest idea of policy development, presentation and campaigning. Sooner or later, as Brown did, young Ed is going to realise that he needs him on board.

That’s if he’s still inclined to join. It’s early in the game, I know, but I have a sense of Labour people starting to think, ‘Oh shit, what have we done?’ Eighteen months down the road, might we have another IDS situation, another leader who wasn’t around long enough to fight an election? If that happens, if they realise that they need a leader with real gravitas, like him or loath him, (I used to be firmly in the latter camp, even though we have the same literary agent, but I’m not sure where I stand any more) there is nobody in Mandy’s league. Of course, he’s a Lord now, and unable to stand for the Commons, but Jack Straw, as Justice Sec and Lord Chancellor, sat on the woolsack as an MP, so is it inconceivable that in this era a peer could be PM and turn up in the House once a week for questions?