Rod Liddle
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And so she did. The topline of her betrayal was Triesman suggesting, casually, and with qualification, that the Russians and Spanish might collude to bribe referees at the World Cup. This sent the FA into a tailspin, was described as an ‘own goal’, ha ha ha, because it could mortally offend foreigners whom we want to vote for us; and everyone in authority, including the new Conservative sports minister, agreed that Triesman should resign from not just the World Cup bid, but also from his two-day-a-week job at the FA.
And yet, at the same time, people seemed to be at a loss as to what it was Lord Triesman had done that was wrong. Instead, they hedged around the issue, suggesting that he had been ‘naive’ and that ‘this is the real world’ and that for these sorts of reasons, he ‘had to go’.
Well, no he didn’t — and if there was any soupçon of principle among his colleagues at the FA, or in government, they would have urged him to stay on and given him their full support. It is little short of a disgrace that instead of doing this they forced him out. It is probably correct that Triesman’s comments slightly damaged the England bid for the 2018 World Cup (not that much, because the hurt parties, Spain and Russia, are rivals for the bid and wouldn’t vote for us anyway) — but he did not broadcast them to the world, Paul Dacre did. Further, he had no intention of broadcasting them to the world — he was simply having a conversation with a friend.
There cannot be a single administrator anywhere who has not held private conversations and reflected from time to time on the incorruptibility or otherwise of referees and who might bribe them. This is a fact acknowledged by the boss of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, who has long worried that referees might be a possible ‘weak link’ in the otherwise, uh, morally irreproachable football industry. But think about it: if Triesman is to be sacked, surely nobody is safe. There are no private conversations to be had, we must talk even to our spouses as if we were in a press conference.
The rest of Ms Jacob’s musings were the usual mixture of coquetry, self-justification and emetic prurience. As it happens, Lord Triesman’s texts to Ms Jacobs were very mild indeed and rather courtly, and there is no suggestion that he wronged her in any way at all. And it’s by no means certain that he had sex with the woman, either — a point you may consider irrelevant but which Dacre does not, as it is used continually to justify the intrusion into the lives of people he believes need bringing down a peg or two.
Some of you may be musing sardonically that it seems a bit rough on Triesman to have been sacked when he didn’t even get a shag — but then you most likely will not have seen her photograph. She has a face which looks like it has been hit several times with a large frying pan and then a five-year-old has come along with a red crayon and drawn a smug smile somewhere in the middle of it. Nasty thing to say of someone, I suppose. But can you imagine how low you would need to be on the scale of human evolution to behave so despicably to someone who had only ever shown you respect and affection?
I wonder what will be done about the Mail on Sunday’s article? Nothing, you assume, as a consequence of the Press Complaints Commission’s utter cowardice when it comes to punishing the big beasts of Fleet Street, not least those run by Paul Dacre. It almost never acts against the tabloids. The PCC recently found against me for — so far as I understand it — not contravening article 1 of their code of conduct, but writing something with which they disagreed (without having the necessary evidence to disagree). So, for the record, how are they going to sort out this latest mess? The Mail on Sunday contravened article 10 of the Editorial Code of Practice, and did so quite clearly. Article 10 states:
The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails; or by the unauthorised removal of documents or photographs; or by accessing digitally-held private information without consent. ii) Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.
Are they going to claim a public interest defence? That’s what they usually do — how we have the right to know everything about people in the public eye. In this particular case, however, it clearly wasn’t in the public interest, because it militated against our bid to host the World Cup, as hundreds upon hundreds of people have pointed out on the Mail’s own website. So it was published against the public interest. Let’s see the vigour with which the PCC go to war against the Mail on Sunday.
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