Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (30 page)

In January 2010, Sky football pundits Andy Gray and Richard Keys saw their careers collapse around them when evidence came out of sexist behaviour that would make Henry VIII blush.

“The game's gone mad,” says Richard Keys.

“I know. Women just don't understand the offside rule.”

“Course they don't, Andy.”

“Napoleon.”

“Napoleon, sorry.”

“It's to do with wombs, probably.”

“The offside rule?”

“No, not understanding it.”

“Thank God for that.”

“A female linesman – it's lunacy. But nobody seems to realise, Rich– I mean, Napoleon.”

“Apart from us,
mon empereur
. It's madness.”

“OK, we're on air in 30 seconds. Are you going to take the hat off?”

“The general's hat? Don't see why.”

“I won't either then. Why should I? It's PC gone mad. Twenty seconds.”

“Have you ever met one who understood it?”

“No, they just wave the flag at random, like a cheerleader. Ten seconds.”

“I think I will take the hat off, actually.”

“Me too.”

Let's leave aside the avalanche of subsequent revelations and go back to the initial leaked recording, because nothing more clearly reveals the bizarre mental world that football commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys have been inhabiting. They're Napoleon, and the rest of us are too insane to realise. They knew they had to keep this knowledge a secret or the lunatics would turn on them, and so it has proved.

A few apologists defended their first remarks as merely humorous. Former England women's cricket captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint said: “These were tongue-in-cheek comments and we are blowing something enormously out of proportion here.” But when you listen to that recording, it's not tongue in cheek at all. Their criticisms of female assistant referee Sian Massey are marked, as Gabby Logan wrote in
The Times
, with a “total lack of laughter”.

I find that fascinating. These men weren't making sexist jokes or taking the piss. They seem genuinely to believe that women can't understand the offside rule. Not just women who don't like football or only watch the occasional match; not just scatterbrained sculptresses or isolated Pacific island tribeswomen; not just Katie Price or the Queen; but women who have worked their entire careers to get a job in football, been fully trained as referees and officiated in hundreds of matches. They think even those women can't understand the offside rule.

It seems reasonable to conclude that these broadcasters are implying that women are, at the very least, slightly less intelligent than men. But possibly only slightly: maybe they reckon that the offside rule is the most complex and difficult concept known
to, well, man. They may think women can do anything else men can do – right up to rocket science, brain surgery and transubstantiation – but that female intelligence cuts off just before that most elusive and nuanced of human ideas, the offside rule. If that's the case, Keys and Gray are a bit sexist, but their main mental health problem is believing a slightly tricky rule from an incredibly straightforward game – a notion on the level of buying hotels in Monopoly – is like existentialism, string theory, the double helix, long division and backing-up-Nokia-phone-contacts-on-an-Apple-computer all rolled into one.

But it may be that they've got a better sense of proportion about the trickiness of offside, yet still consider it to be beyond any woman's intellectual grasp. If that's the case, they must spend most of their lives looking around in horrified bewilderment. They think women are imbeciles and yet there women are, walking around, wearing clothes, holding down jobs, being allowed to vote – driving around in cars, for God's sake! Gray and Keys must be terrified.

Could chimps be taught the offside rule? Or dolphins? That octopus seemed to know a lot about football. How basic an organism do Andy and Richard consider the female of their species to be? And why has Andy had sex with so many of them? Sarah Palin must be even more horrifying to them than she is to the rest of us: they're not worried that, if she became president, she'd destroy the world out of evil, inflexible rightwing rage, but just because the red button looked like a Smartie.

Is that why they've forged careers in football, the last bastion of male dominance? The moron women – the shaggable zombies, the lipstick-wearing Borg – hadn't yet broken into that citadel. It was safe. But now, with the sight of a woman on the touchline, randomly waving a flag or not waving a flag (and occasionally doing it at the right time by pure luck, the jammy bitch), they know that the Matrix's machines have entered Zion.

These men have so completely misapprehended the nature of humanity that they should be pitied. Poor, stupid Richard Keys – he probably doesn't even understand how funny it is that he said: “Did you hear charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah, do me a favour, love.” But it's hard to pity people who have built massively successful careers in spite of mirthless arrogance, a towering sense of entitlement and disdain for a world they're convinced has got everything wrong. So I don't.

And these guys aren't alone. Football is full of Napoleons. Croatian FA president Vlatko Markovic is a good example. In 2010, he said: “While I'm a president of the Croatian Football Federation, there will be no homosexuals playing in the national team”, adding: “Luckily, only normal people play football.” Yeah, normal people like Paul Gascoigne, Wayne Rooney, Gordon Ramsay, George Best and Craig Bellamy. What normal people.

It's certainly true that very few professional footballers admit to the “abnormality” of being gay. Maybe it's fancying men that messes with the brain's offside-understanding lobe? But surely that would make lesbian refs OK?

The worst thing about the footballing Napoleon complex is that it's so possessive of a game that shouldn't, and ultimately can't, be possessed. The human urge to kick a ball around and attempt to get it into a goal, and the urge to watch other people doing that, are innocent and harmless pleasures. How come they're so often marred by tedious bastards – from Andy Gray to Roman Abramovich to Sepp Blatter – trying to own the fun? They want to be able to take their balls away if we don't play with them in the way they like. When they can't, they start whining.

So, yes, Andy and Richard, the game's gone mad. Enjoy St Helena. I hope it's St Helena, not Elba.

“Do you want to tell that to Her Majesty Queen Noor?” thundered the estate manager to the head gardener. Or at least she did according to the now ex-head gardener, Amanda Hill, who has brought a constructive dismissal case against her former employers. Allegedly this remark was the response to Mrs Hill explaining that, for compelling climatic reasons, she was unable to accede to her boss Queen Noor of Jordan's demand that she grow mangoes and avocados in the Berkshire countryside.

“Can't is not a word for princes,” as Elizabeth I said (or at least did in
Blackadder
). If this story is true, then it's inspiring that Queen Noor, an educated woman who must surely have a reasonable grasp of the flora of the home counties, has sufficient belief in the power of royalty to ask for the impossible. That's what command is all about – exhorting people to superhuman efforts, making them believe that, with royal favour, anything can be done. This is the spirit of Agincourt, the bravado of Canute, the self-belief that allowed Henry VIII to cock a snook at the Pope. Alternatively, she may have thought there was a greenhouse.

Queen Noor's regal hauteur compares favourably with our own royal family's beleaguered self-esteem. When the Duke of York went to India to represent his mother on the occasion of the diamond jubilee, he was criticised for flying first class. This made me feel sorry for him. Maybe we just shouldn't have princes at all – it's not exactly the most modern of systems. Personally, I'm fine with it but I can see the arguments against. But if we're going to have them, we can't really make them fly economy, can we? If we're having a constitutional monarchy, we've got to accept that the royals will be on one side of the barrier accepting flowers and smiling while the rest of us are on the other, presenting them and waving flags. That system doesn't really work if these arbitrarily appointed guests of honour have to travel to the event by bus and then queue with everyone else to meet themselves.

Even the Queen (EIIR, not Noor) faces problems. Her diamond jubilee pageant underwent a funding crisis, with the organiser Lord Salisbury complaining that “the lack of generosity from British firms has given me a huge amount of unnecessary work”. Do you want to tell that to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth? Come on, man, stop moaning! Pull your finger out before she chops your head off! You've only got to organise a boat show, not make the Aberdeenshire loam bring forth pineapples. Sadly though, he clearly has no fear of his sovereign's wrath.

Maybe she should take a leaf out of Ray O'Rourke's book. He's the multimillionaire construction boss who wants to demolish his Essex mansion and build an identical one in its place. Or more or less identical, anyway. Obviously it'll be a lot more horrible and have a home cinema. The council won't let him – it seems “can't” is still a word for captains of industry. For now. But he's appealing. Which is deeply unappealing.

But that's only because he's a businessman. What seems unpleasantly vulgar in a tycoon is appropriately headstrong in a king. Getting massive portraits painted of yourself, wearing enormous gold accessories, employing staff in funny uniforms, being driven around in horse-drawn carriages – these are the preserves of the most and least pukka: of Charles II and Mr T, of Louis XIV and Richard Branson, of the Queen of Jordan and Jordan. When Henry IV of France built the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre in 1607, it was the longest corridor in the world and he reputedly used it to hold indoor fox hunts. People thought that was classy as hell but, in modern terms, it might as well have been a revolving rooftop bowling alley lined with tropical fish tanks.

When commoners do these things it seems pretentious and presumptuous. But what does being royal really mean? It just refers to families who have kept up the pretence and continued to presume for centuries. William the Conqueror took England by force and most of his descendants have subsequently held their
nerve: royalty is a confidence trick, and that requires confidence. You can't keep that show on the road with humility; you do it by claiming to be anointed by the Almighty, by asserting that you can cure scrofula, by branding rivals as traitors and usurpers when in truth they're just competitors, by demanding loyalty with the intensity of an organised criminal, by expecting home-grown mangoes in Berkshire.

The Queen needs to get back to basics. She's talked the talk of service so long that she's started to believe it. Most of her ancestors would not approve. “I serve” may be what the Prince of Wales's motto means but the monarch's translates as “God and my right”. If she wants to keep her right, she may have to assert it more forcefully. Napoleon Bonaparte knew a thing or two about claiming royal status, having styled himself an emperor. He was amazed that, on the night the Tuileries palace was finally stormed, Louis XVI taken into custody and his guards slaughtered, the king didn't make more of a show of resistance: “If Louis XVI had mounted his horse, the victory would have been his,” he said.

For our monarch, though, the answer may lie in dogs rather than horses. I was heartened to read of an occasion in 2011 when, according to “a royal insider”, the Queen “quite simply … went bonkers”. This was when she discovered that the food that her beloved corgis were being given wasn't fresh but had been frozen and reheated. “That's more like it, ma'am,” I thought. “Going mental because the dogs have been given, not dog food – that would be unimaginable – but normal human-quality food that's been in the freezer.” That's exactly the sort of thing you can imagine George V or Mariah Carey doing.

Royal protocol is nothing but a massive rider, dignified by centuries. Bowing and curtsying is only a historical version of a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. Both rock stars and royals are treated with the sort of weird reverence that, if not rigidly maintained, will quickly turn to contempt. Stop
demanding impossible mangoes for one second, and you'll end up shopping in Iceland with everyone else – and it won't just be for the dog.

There are lean times ahead for Britain's high streets: Weight Watchers is opening a chain of shops. And, if you hated that joke, take comfort from the fact that its days are numbered. As obesity rather than thinness becomes established as the west's poverty signifier, lean-equals-broke will have no resonance in the shiny, sweaty, globulous and wheezing future.

The rich thincats of the decades to come will pay good money to remain skinny, and the aspirant plump to become so, which is presumably why Weight Watchers thinks it's on to a winner with these new “Lifestyle Centres”, which will provide one-to-one weight-loss consultations and “express weigh-ins” and in general will, as spokesman Chris Stirk puts it, “offer a more personalised and flexible service for busy people like working mums and office workers who can pop in when they have time”.

You can see the way they're styling themselves: it's weight loss for today's busy, connected, results-orientated fat person. It's for the fatty on the move, wobbling dynamically from one meeting to the next: they've only got time to hop on those scales and get a pep talk from a dietician before whizzing off to their next appointment, executive muumuu billowing in their wake. If they haven't had time for lunch (unlikely but possible), they might get one of the centres' “grab and go” meals, such as their 243-calorie prawn mayonnaise sandwich, which would probably leave you hungry, but that's OK because, on a British high street, there's bound to be a KFC next door.