From bad to worse

Again, I'm finding myself not blogging very often during the current lockdown.  And that's good, of course, because it means that I am busy.  It's 12 days since the last chapter (and thank you, by the way, for the feedback on that) and sadly I'm afraid that we don't seem to have moved on a lot since then.  I was moved to write that last chapter after seeing some criticism of the BHA which I thought was unfair.  Sadly the flak is still flying and the target seems to have been refined from the BHA in general to its chief executive Nick Rust in particular.  This situation is at least as bad as the previous one.

This all came to light on Sunday when the Sunday Telegraph published an article under the headline, 'Trainers call for horse racing chief to quit over restart delay'.  This got my goat from the outset.  Unwisely, I got into a bit of debate about this on the day on Twitter (just as writing about it here is probably unwise too) and it seems that some regard this is high-quality journalism, but to me this is just sensationalist tripe.  The article centred around what is undeniably a big story, the story that Ralph Beckett had emailed BHA Chair Annamarie Phelps to ask for Nick Rust's resignation, with the additional ingredient that Mark Johnston had echoed the call.  So that's two trainers calling for Nick Rust's resignation - but the overall context is that that is two out of over 500, there being over 500 of us in Great Britain.

(The article stated that Ralph had claimed that three more trainers, Andrew Balding, Nigel Tinkler and Richard Hannon, had also echoed his call.  Bizarrely, and for no reason that I can see other than a lack of thoroughness, the writers of the article appear not to have contacted these three to check whether they do actually support Ralph on this.  I would have thought that that would have been the first thing a conscientious journalist would have done.  There were only three of them, and making three short telephone calls is hardly an onerous assignment.  So we either have two trainers calling for Nick Rust's resignation, or five - but the writers omitted to find out which).

Anyway, that aside, it was a good article.  And I don't want to criticise the writers too harshly for their failure to tie up that loose end because overall it was a good, balanced piece.  They had sought out the opposing view and got it too, from three well respected and authoritative figures: Luca Cumani, Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls.  But the headline (not written by the journalists, presumably) was a shocker, the type of attention-grabbing, sensationalism which one would expect to find in a tabloid rather than a once-great broadsheet.  While technically the headline is true, its implication - that trainers in general are calling for Nick Rust to quit - is totally wrong.  'Two trainers call ...' or 'Ralph Beckett and Mark Johnston call ...' would have been far less misleading.  Or even '0.4% (or possibly 1%, but we have failed to check on the other three) of Britain's trainers call ...'.  Any of those three would have done a far better job of summing up the contents of the article than the headline which was chosen; and that, after all, is the point of a headline.

Maybe I'm just being oversensitive.  I probably am.  But I was initially perplexed.  I thought that if there was a call from trainers, I would have heard about it because it would have come via the National Trainers' Federation, and I read all the emails which that body sends out to us.  And there had been not a word about the possibility of a call from trainers for Nick Rust's resignation.  My own opinion is that calling for Nick Rust's resignation is not sensible and I was not amused to read that a group of people of which I am one (ie 'trainers') was reportedly calling for it.

Which takes us back to where we were 12 days ago.  What are the BHA in general and Nick Rust in particular meant to be doing that they are not doing in regard to the resumption of racing?  Detailed contingency plans have been drawn up to be brought into use when the time is ready for the go-ahead to be given and received.  But they have to remain contingency plans until we know when that time is coming, and we definitely are not there yet.  Not nearly there yet.  In the past three days we have heard first Dominic Raab and then Boris Johnson state quite clearly that we are not close to the implementation of any withdrawal strategy from the current lockdown.  You couldn't get confirmation any more conclusive than that.

Furthermore, a government minister (I don't know his name but he's one of the ones in charge of this area) gave this response yesterday in the House of Commons, having been asked by Newbury's MP about the resumption of racing, "... At this stage it's not possible to give a timescale when current restraints will be relaxed ...".  So we're clearly getting ahead of ourselves if we think that we're on the brink of a return to the racecourse.  So we're dreaming if we think that Nick Rust in particular or the BHA in general should be trying to move things on more quickly than he/it is.  That would do more harm than good, wouldn't it?  And what's this thing about him having given notice so he should go now?  The 12-month notice protocol is eminently sensible, allowing time to identify and appoint his successor and then for the successor to work out his/her notice from his/her current job.  It isn't just Brexit which works better (less disastrously!) with a 'transition period'.

So what do we learn from this?  Well, trainers in general and the NTF in particular have a problem in that it's fine for Ralph to form his own opinions and express them, except for the fact that (a) irresponsible headline writers, as we have just seen, are likely to twist them to imply that they come from trainers in general, and (b) he will be the NTF President next year and so the situation could get a lot worse, in that we could find that every time he gives a personal opinion on something, it could be wrongly portrayed as being the opinion of the NTF.  (And, by the way, I do think that Ralph has been badly treated in this: this principal villain of the piece is - see below - the person who leaked Ralph's email, which was never intended for public consumption and which should never have been used to cause the damage which it has wreaked).

And the BHA has a major problem.  Ralph's opinion was given in a private email to Annamarie Phelps.  One can assume that she will have shared its contents with the other members of the BHA board as he was writing to her not as a private citizen but as the Chair of the BHA, so it would have been incorrect for her just to sit on it rather than discuss it with the rest of the board.  So how has the email found itself being quoted in a Sunday Telegraph article?  I find it hard to believe that either its author or its primary recipient would have leaked it.  But, presumably, somebody must have done.

And that somebody (whoever it is, and presumably only a small number of people would have had a copy of the email - or do we think that the Sunday Telegraph has become as proficient in illegal surveillance as some of its tabloid competitors?) has been the trigger for an episode which has been thoroughly damaging not just for Ralph in particular and for trainers in general, but for racing too, displaying the sport's constituents as a disunited and self-centred rabble at a time when particularly we should be presenting a united and altruistic front.  It is rare nowadays to see a charge of bringing racing into disrepute, but whoever enabled this dirty washing to be aired in public has been the catalyst for some serious damage to the sport's standing in the eyes of the public.  The person responsible, as I see it anyway, has committed as serious an offence of bringing racing (and Ralph!) into disrepute as one could see.

I might as well end this chapter by giving my opinion.  Not, probably, that you want to hear it.  But then you probably didn't want to hear Ralph's either, but the Sunday Telegraph rammed it down out throats even so.  I think that the BHA is handling this crisis well and I think that the likelihood is that Nick Rust's successor, whoever that turns out to be, will do the job less well than Nick Rust has been doing it.  And who will that successor be?  I have no idea.  Who would want the job (apart from someone who was only doing it for the money, and the last thing we want is someone who is only doing it for the money)?  Even before this, I was thinking that finding someone to do it would be hard: I regard myself as being mentally tougher than most, but even so I readily admit that I would not be sufficiently thick-skinned to cope with the incessant and mostly unfair criticism.  It was going to be hard to find the right person even before the intervention of whoever leaked Ralph's email.  It's going to be even harder now.