Monthly Archives: March 2008

Signal failure and terminal decline – just another week for Britain’s pitiful transport system

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The opening of Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow airport has been an unmitigated PR disaster for British Airways and BAA, the airport operator.

Four days of chaos have followed the first flights into T5. Critics have been swift to declare the scenes a national humiliation.

It’s easy to agree. How could an opening planned for 15 years have gone so badly?

It’s equally easy to link the T5 fiasco with the shambles that was the Millennium Dome, and the embarrassment of the opening – and immediate closure – of the wobbly Millennium bridge footbridge over the Thames.

Yet Britain and transport have long had a frightful, and frightening, relationship. Just this week, half of London was brought to a standstill because of ‘late running engineering work’ and signal failures on the Underground. Any sensible country would notice the monotonous regularity of such failures and do something to ensure no repeat. But this is Britain. Oh, and if you think that’s bad enough, the dinosaur rail unions are planning to bring the city to a halt under totally spurious claims of safety concerns.

We suspected the opening of Terminal 5 might not be a glorious new dawn months ago. A friend of ours who is a senior member of BA cabin crew said chaos was inevitable. "They’re installing the same baggage handling system in T5 that has caused chaos everywhere else. It’s a recipe for disaster." Needless to say, BA boss Willie Walsh took no notice…

CTC’s Kevin Mayne explains why he defended David Cameron’s cycling

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Kevin Mayne, the director of Britain’s national cycling organisation CTC, has explained on CTC’s website why he defended Conservative leader David Cameron’s apparent law-breaking when cycling in London. (A week ago, the Daily Mirror published pictures of Cameron cycling the wrong way down a one way street.) As Mayne says:

"I checked out the Mirror’s coverage in some detail and I was furious. After 3 days of trailing Cameron they ended up with just four photos that they said was either illegal or dangerous riding, plus some footage on line. I am not condoning illegal or dangerous cycling but this was plain daft.

"I know most of that route, I use it regularly. In most of the photos he was doing exactly what we all do – he crossed a toucan on red because there were no cars coming, he moved to the front of the queue at traffic lights and the so called roundabout he went round the wrong way is a bollard in the Mall.

"Going up a one way street the wrong way was the one really illegal act, but we have shown the Department for Transport on many occasions that much of Europe allows cyclists to go against the flow in designated one way streets."

Mayne’s comments have caused quite a stir, with commentators contrasting his views with those of safety campaigners, who condemned Cameron.

I can understand why Mayne took his stance. Cameron has become one of Britain’s most high profile cyclists. There’s little doubt that the country’s transport system would be in rather better shape if politicians actually had to cycle or use trains and tubes rather than chauffeur driven cars. But I think Cameron and Mayne have both blundered. We cyclists win few friends by ignoring the rules – and we should be trying to win friends and influence people. Kevin’s argument that the Tory leader was simply doing what we all do was not convincing.

There’s also a lingering doubt whether Cameron is a genuine cyclist rather than a politician creating some useful photo-opportunities. (We all remember the story of his driver following by car with his brief case.) How odd that a savvy and image conscious politician has scored two PR own goals with his cycling.

Who’d be a football manager?

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Who’d be a football manager? Nothing but a 100% record will satisfy media and club owners. Yet in real life total success is a dream, not a reality – even for the most successful teams.

Take today’s games in the English Premier League. Chelsea boss Avram Grant was regarded as a ‘dead man walking’ in the grotesque language of sporting journalism. (See today’s Sunday Times for just a flavour.) Yet his team today overcame Arsenal having been a goal down. Grant has been manager for just six months. So talk of his inability to influence the big games seemed premature – and he came up trumps today. His predecessor, the fabled Jose Mourinho, appeared to have run out of patience with his billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, and had hit losing ways before he was fired. Who’s to say Jose would have done better had he stayed? But then the media can never lose a game…

It’s just the same in another sport, rugby union. Today’s Sunday Times also called time on Brian Ashton’s time as England rugby’s chief coach. Ashton is a patently decent man who has been frustrated by the intrugue surrounding his job. Against all expectations, he led England to the runners up medals in the World Cup and Six Nations. True, there have been some dreadful failures along the way, but sport isn’t a one way street. One of the more shameful sights of the 2008 Six Nations was the BBC’s Sonia McLoughlin repeatedly asking Ashton if he had any hope of keeping his job. This after an impressive win over Ireland secured second place in the championship. One wonders how many Six Nations games McLoughlin has played… Ashton, to his credit, kept his cool.

True, Avram and Brian are well rewarded for their pains. But so are the media know-alls who pursue them.

Daily Express’s McCann apology: a sad day for British journalism

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Express Star apology

The Daily Express and its sister papers this week hit the headlines for an abject apology to Madeleine McCann’s parents for wrongly suggesting in over 100 articles that the McCanns had caused their daughter’s death. The papers have also paid £550,000 to the Find Madeleine fund.

This is a shocking story. The Express long ago lost the right to describe itself as a newspaper. Its front page lead stories are totally contrived: witness its obsession with Princess Diana’s death long after the rest of the country lost interest with its former icon. But the way the Express group knowingly published lies about the McCanns to boost its sales is quite simply wicked.

What I find depressing is that Britain’s press is regulated. yet the regulators are toothless and over-influenced by the papers they regulate. But then what do you expect given that we’re talking about self regulation by the industry? Media commentator Roy Greenslade pointed out in his Media Guardian blog that most of Britain’s press largely ignored the Express apology. To its credit, The Guardian published a leader in which it said "Newspapers should not tell lies about people, and it is good when they are punished for doing so."

The Guardian leader also questioned the role of the rest of the media, including the BBC, which sent Huw Edwards to Portugal to present news bulletins. This is where news collides with celebrity. To be fair, the McCanns themselves contributed to the process by trying to keep Madeleine in the headlines as long as possible. Their motive was understandable but it’s debatable how much their involvement encouraged the media to pursue the story long after the publicity had become a liability rather than a help to the search. That said, there’s absolutely no excuse for the lies that the Express told in its shameless pursuit of sales.

You can’t blame Margaret Thatcher for everything…

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Margaret Thatcher gets blamed for a lot of things. The destruction of great swathes of British industry. The growth of the ‘me’ society. The decline of the fabric of British cities. But the BBC’s Hugh Sykes tonight added another charge to the list. Sykes said on Radio 5 Live’s Drive programme that some people blamed her, along with the first President Bush, for failing to protect Iraq’s Kurdish people at the end of 1991 Gulf War.

I’m not usually the first person to leap to the iron lady’s defence. But in this case she has a cast iron alibi. She was ousted from office the previous year….  John Major was the man in Number 10 at the time.

How London’s media ignored Welsh rugby’s Grand Slam triumph

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Anyone looking for evidence that the London media can’t see further than their own navels would have found it with coverage of Wales’s Grand Slam in rugby’s RBS Six Nations tournament.

To recap, Wales won a stunning victory. They beat France without conceding a try. They shipped just two tries in the five game championship – a new record. Wales won away to England at Twickenham for the first time in 20 years. The Grand Slam marked an extraordinary change in fortunes under new head coach Warren Gatland, just six months after Fuji dumped Wales out of the Rugby World Cup. An enthralling story.

But the London media were unmoved. Saturday’s Guardian sport section gave greater prominence to previewing England’s game against Ireland. The Sunday Times sports section was dominated by Danny Cipriani’s performance in England’s win against Ireland: ‘Oh Danny Boy’ screamed the section headline, suggesting the pun took precedence over news values. The Cipriani story was an intriguing one – he displaced England’s 2003 world cup winning hero Jonny Wilkinson – but it was only ever a sideshow as England had no chance of beating Wales to the championship.  England’s game took the best part of four pages of coverage compared with half the attention for the team of the tournament – Wales.

Despite the paper’s anglocentric priorities, The Sunday Times lavished rich praise on the champions. In the words of rugby writer Stephen Jones:

"Heroes, lots of heroes, dressed in red. This was a day to compare with any in the proud history of a rugby country so tiny in terms of its productive sporting areas that you could almost jog around it. Any doubts that Wales are the best team in Europe, any doubts that they are anything other than an outstanding team in the making, were blown away. In rugby’s greatest stadium, we had one of the grandest Slams.

It is a measure of the Welsh performance that France came to play with ferocity, and were a minimum of 30 points better than at any stage of the season to date. Their coach finally grew up, chose his first team, and either side of half-time they came in avenging torrents of attacks, leaving Wales hanging on for dear life.

"There was much that was magnificent about this Welsh team, but it was their defence that was almost beyond praise. They have conceded two tries in their campaign and yesterday, their courage and also their organisation was sensational, especially since dangerous men such as Vincent Clerc and Damien Traille were surging at them in midfield, with the flankers hammering on around the fringes. It is a triumph among triumphs for coach Shaun Edwards that a supercharged French team never looked like scoring a try."

Shame that Stephen Jones’s paper was more interested in a sideshow at Twickenham.

Glory days: Wales claim rugby’s Grand Slam

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The win, when it came, was convincing. Wales beat France yesterday at Cardiff’s Millennium stadium to win rugby’s Grand Slam – a clean sweep of wins in the RBS Six Nations tournament. 

For Wales, the 2008 Grand Slam feels more substantial than that of 2005. The euphoria was just as strong three years ago but that win soon faded, and coach Mike Ruddock was fired less than a year later amidst stories of player unrest. Yesterday’s triumph was won by Wales’s amazing transformation under head coach, Warren Gatland, and defence coach Shaun Edwards. The team conceded just two tries in five games – an extraordinary achievement. Just imagine – beating France and not allowing them a try. The contrast with 2005, when Yachvili spectacularly cut open the Welsh defence, was striking.

Yesterday, Gatland and Edwards understandably insisted that the success belonged to the players. "People are trying to give me the credit in this Six Nations but I haven’t made one tackle in this year’s championship…" joked Edwards. Yet no one was fooled. This was a classic example of how passionate and clever coaches can raise players’ performances. The statistics tell the story: Wales made 128 tackles compared with France’s 79. A tremendous tribute to the fitness and commitment of this Welsh side. Six years ago the then England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson capitalised on his brief moment of success by writing a book about motivational management. Gatland and Edwards could teach Sven a thing or two!

I reflected on this blog last week how Wales’s sporting renaissance has evoked memories of the fabulous 1970s. Welsh rugby legend Gerald Davies wrote in similar vein in Friday’s Times newspaper. He recalled how the then prime minister and Cardiff MP Jim Callaghan invited the Welsh Grand Slam heroes of 1978 to celebrate at 10 Downing Street. How ironic that Callaghan’s Labour party and Welsh rugby shared the losing habit for years afterwards.

You can see highlights of the 1978 Grand Slam on YouTube.

See my separate post on how London’s media ignored Wales’s Grand Slam triumph.

British citizens or subjects? Goldsmith’s citizenship proposals come under fire

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The current British Government’s attempts to define and develop Britishness risk dividing the country rather than uniting it. Lord Goldsmith’s review of citizenship, commissioned by Gordon Brown, raises the idea of a coming of age ceremony in which new adults would swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch. Or so the media would have you believe.

A quick glance at Goldsmith’s report throws doubt on whether the former attorney general actually proposed such an oath. The report makes very tentative recommendations; its hesitancy seems out of proportion to the resulting torrent of abuse. Small wonder that Peter Watson of Chester commented in a letter in today’s Guardian that knee-jerk negativity is the essence of Britishness today.

Yet the debate, however imperfect, does shine a light into the curious nature of British citizenship. Traditionally, the British have been subjects not citizens, which is why many – not just republicans – oppose the idea of swearing an oath to the Queen rather than to the country. The British national anthem is all about the monarch, not the country. And the debate isn’t confined to the United Kingdom. Back in January, Canada’s CBC reported that a Canadian army officer had lost his legal battle to win exemption from the duty to swear allegiance to the Queen of Canada. The shadow of the British empire continues to influence the life of Britain’s former dominions; there’s something curious about a Canadian officer having to swear an oath to foreign queen.

Obama’s adviser Power resigns over ‘off the record’ insult to Hillary Clinton

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A fascinating debate has started on Roy Greenslade’s Guardian blog over whether The Scotsman newspaper should have published comments by US presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s adviser Samantha Power. Power was quoted as saying Hillary Clinton was a monster but thought the comments were ‘off the record’ – not for publication. Power resigned following publication.

The full quote:

"In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything."

Greenslade thinks that the Scotsman was wrong to publish the comments. It was clear, in his view, that Power’s remark was off the record. He thinks that the paper went ahead because it knew it wouldn’t matter if Power vowed never to speak to its reporters again. It had its scoop. It woudn’t have taken the risk had the comments been made by a British politician, whom the paper would want to talk to in the future.

I was brought up on the following golden rules for talking to journalists:

  1. There’s no such thing as off the record.
  2. Never say anything that you wouldn’t want to see in print or broadcast; it’s the only safe approach;
  3. Only go off the record to a journalist you know and trust. And even then remember rules 1 and 2 above – don’t say you haven’t been warned.

That said, most people in PR will go off the record, even to journalists they don’t know. It’s their way of guiding the journalist further than they could if they were talking on the record. But the dangers are always present, as Power has discovered to her cost.

Power’s comment was foolish – on or off the record – but would be seen as rather tame in British political life. True, there would have been contrived outrage if, for example, David Cameron’s aides had called Gordon Brown a monster. But most people in Britain would just dismiss such remarks as an example of the playground behaviour all too common in the Westminster village.

Cardiff City – the football club with no country

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Cardiff City are to play Barnsley in the FA Cup semi finals.

Barnsley’s amazing feat in knocking out Liverpool and Chelsea will make them formidable opponents. But the Bluebirds must fancy their chances, having totally outplayed Middlesbrough. And as I said in my weekend post, it would be good to succeed where two of English football’s big four failed! We shall see.

If Cardiff do repeat the triumph of 1927, they won’t get to play in Europe. (The FA Cup winners usually enter the UEFA cup.) As a club from outside England, they can’t represent England in European competitions. That seems fair enough; back in the Seventies and Eighties on several occasions Cardiff played in Europe as runners up in the Welsh Cup because that competition had been won by an English club, who similarly could not represent Wales.

Since 1995, UEFA rules mean only teams competing in the amateur Welsh league can enter the Welsh Cup, which means that Cardiff are effectively a club without a country. As I wrote in October 2006, the Welsh FA had asked UEFA to reconsider but the request seems to have failed.