Peter Moores: 'The portrayal of me as a coach is wrong'

George Dobell - Cricinfo

"Frustration" is a word that crops up often in Peter Moores' sentences at present.

He is "frustrated" that he cannot finish the job he started in rebuilding the England team. He is frustrated that he will never lead England through an Ashes series. He is "frustrated" that history appears to have repeated itself. And he is, in his words, "doubly frustrated" that his portrayal in the media differs so markedly from reality.

That portrayal stems, in part, from a radio interview conducted by the BBC moments after England's World Cup exit. In it, Moores was alleged to have said that England would need to check the "data" before coming to any conclusions about the reasons for their failure.

It came to be a defining moment in his downfall. It has been used to illustrate his perceived faults: an obsession with stats and a propensity to overanalyse. England's talented young players, it was said, were stifled by such a policy.

But it never happened. As was reported by ESPNcricinfo, Moores actually said "later" in that BBC interview. But his words were misheard - an honest and understandable mistake as there was a minor microphone malfunction during the interview - and while the BBC subsequently apologised to him (at first verbally and then in writing), the error was public and the apology was private. The damage, in terms of public perception, was done.

The image of Moores as stats-driven has little basis in reality. So frustrated was Nathan Leamon, England's analyst at the World Cup, by the lack of use of his statistics that it was briefly feared he may go home. Meanwhile Paul Farbrace, Moores' faithful deputy and the man who has recently been portrayed as a liberator of the England team, has said repeatedly that the Sri Lanka team he coached to success in the 2014 World T20 used such data far more.



"I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride" © Getty Images





While it is true Moores used the word "data" during an excellent eight-minute interview on Sky (he said "we'll have to analyse the data") it was in response to several detailed questions and after an initial answer that started: "Now is not the time to be analysing."

It is Moores' frustration - that word again - at such a characterisation that has prompted him to talk now. While he remained silent the first time he was sacked as England coach, declining lucrative invitations to give his side of the story, this time he has decided to speak in an attempt to correct at least a few of the misconceptions about his period as coach. He was not paid and the only item he would not discuss is how he was sacked.

While Moores will not be drawn on it - he is simply not the sort to be dragged into mudslinging - ESPNcricinfo understands that he learned of his fate after his wife read about it on Twitter and phoned him. Whatever you think of him or Paul Downton (who learned of his fate a similar way), they deserved better than that. The ECB, to its credit, apologised in private and public.

He does not comment, though. He hardly ever does. When he was sacked as England coach at the start of 2009, he said nothing. When England went to No. 1 in the Test rankings in 2011, largely with players he had selected, he said nothing. When Kevin Pietersen's book came out, he said nothing. And each day he woke up and read another column from an ex-player - usually an ex-player he had dropped during his first spell as England coach - rubbishing his methods and caricaturing his personality, he said nothing.

"I have to accept my time as England coach has gone," Moores says. "It's pretty hard to accept. But it's done. The umpire's finger is up. I have to look at where I go next.

"But I am frustrated. The portrayal of me as a coach in the media is just wrong. If people said 'I don't rate you as a coach' then fine. But when it's not what you are, it's really frustrating.

"I don't know how to change that. I've not spent my life trying to be really good with the media; I've spent it trying to make players better. I still passionately want to do that.

"I have an official letter from the BBC. It's a tough one, I didn't say it. I know what I am as a coach. I've done it for a long time. I've been in the game for 33 years and I've coached for 17. I know the game. And what I've learned is, my job is to simplify the game for players and free them up to go and play.

"We moved away from stats and data. Coaching doesn't work like that at all. You watch a lot to say a little. It's not a numbers game. We kept it simple. We tried to give the players responsibility to lead themselves.

"There is a big support staff with England. And they're all valuable. You need the security staff, the physio and the doctor. But there are times when you just want the 11 players and two coaches to watch the game and talk about it together. We were creating that environment. We were getting there."

The "we were getting there" phrase is another recurring theme. Moores felt his England side were on the right track. While he accepts the World Cup was wretched, there was evidence in Test cricket, that they were making progress. At the time he was sacked, England - a side containing half-a-dozen young or inexperienced players - had won four and lost one of their last six Tests.

Against relatively modest opposition that is perhaps decent rather than exceptional. But Moores did inherit an England side that had just been beaten 5-0 in the Ashes and was clearly in a transitional phase. It was always going to take time.

"In Test terms, we felt we had turned a corner," Moores says. "We were getting there. Would I have been sacked had we won in Barbados? You'll have to ask the people who made the decision. I was aware that things were building but I wasn't expecting it.

"The frustration is not being able to carry something through. When I took the job, I knew we would go through this period of trial. And transition is difficult. You will lose sometimes.

"The evolution, of a team, of a player, is that you're going to be inconsistent. You're going to lose. But in Tests we were moving and moving quite fast. You could see it happening. Young players were developing fast. And you know there is a timeframe for that.

"I'm also confident in my ability to evolve teams to become very good teams. And, given time, I've always gone on to be successful. And you're not trying to be successful for a short time, but for a long time.

"So to not have time to finish the job with England... I thought we were getting there. I was genuinely excited when we got back from the Caribbean."

Moores denies any mixed emotions at watching England's improved showing against New Zealand. But it has not gone unnoticed that, just as he built the side that Andy Flower went on to lead to such success (Flower, it should be noted, was always the first to praise Moores' contribution), he will spend the next few years seeing some of those he selected this time flourish in international cricket.

It was, after all, Moores that replaced the new-ball pair of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard with James Anderson and Stuart Broad. He installed Graeme Swann as first-choice spinner and Matt Prior as wicketkeeper. He laid many of the foundations on which Flower built.

This time, his commitment to Jos Buttler, Moeen Ali, Gary Ballance (originally selected by Flower), Joe Root (who had been dropped by the time Moores took over) and others could have similar long-term benefits.



Moores brought new faces into the England side during both spells in charge © AFP





"I didn't go into the job to get the credit," he says. "But yes, history probably has repeated itself a bit. I'd love it if England won the Ashes. I'm an England fan.

"I've probably debuted more players than most England coaches. You hope when you introduce players that they'll carry on in the long term. I think we picked some good players who will become good England players over time. They'll go through ups and down.

"I know I left a united group of people - players and coaches - with a clear vision of where we were going and working towards it. I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride."

It seems he was rated in his second spell as England coach, in part, by the mistakes he made in his first. Famously described as "the woodpecker" by Kevin Pietersen - an image that suggests a man forever tapping away at players and, as a result, preventing them from relaxing - Moores admits he made some mistakes the first time around.

"I don't think there was any truth in the woodpecker thing, no," he says now. "But I do think the version of me as a coach now to the version that first coached England is a better version.

"I evolved quite a lot as a coach, as a player would. It's no different. This time I knew what I was going into. You understand the real challenges for players, as you've been there before.

"I've reflected on that first time. We needed to change. And I look back and think, yes, in my enthusiasm, I pushed too hard. You should allow that to happen. I wanted them to be fitter and, yes, you can push too hard.

"So I knew when I came in this time, there had been mistakes made. I wanted to allow captains to evolve themselves and create a place where the players felt supported.

"Part of the skill of a coach is to disappear. You're in the room but it's as if you aren't. You're not making anyone nervous. Because if you need 40 to win in four overs, nobody wants a coach who is twitchy.

"Look, I've made loads of mistakes as a coach. But you make fewer as you learn. That side of my coaching, I know, I've got better."

England's performance - or lack of it - at the World Cup does not reflect well on anyone, though. While they went into the event talking an aggressive game, they played pretty timid cricket, with Moores' selections - Ian Bell as opener and Gary Ballance at No. 3 - contrasting starkly with the approach in the recent ODI series against New Zealand.

So does he accept that either the selections were flawed or he was unable to coax the best out of the players?

"In terms of selection, we got to the final of the tri-series with Ian Bell playing very well. I think he made two centuries and we made 300 against Australia. And Moeen was playing with freedom.

"We moved James Taylor down the order as we felt he was a good finisher and brought Gary in as he has a very good record in limited-overs cricket. He's a very good player. Ravi Bopara was struggling a bit and not really getting a bowl. It all felt natural at the time and we tried to stay consistent in selection.

"As to getting it out of them... great players don't always play great cricket. It didn't happen for them. Senior players didn't grab the game by the scruff of neck. But you learn from failure and the reaction of those players who went through it is encouraging.

"But yes, I felt hollow at the end of the tournament."

The one thing Moores will not ever do is blame the players. Never, in public or private, does he seek to do so. In fact, it is notable that, on or off the record, he does not criticise anyone. Not Andrew Strauss, not Kevin Pietersen (about whom he says, "he's a funny mix. There are things I admire") and not Colin Graves, who was in Barbados at the time of Moores' last Test but didn't find the time to tell his coach he was about to be sacked. His only gripe, really, is with his public image as a stats-driven, robotic coach and the interview that may have cemented that reputation.

It is notable, too, that several of the players have made their support of Moores public. Joe Root, who called him "brilliant" and praised him as knowing "how to get the best out of me", crediting Moores for his "drastic improvement", was the most vocal but also far from atypical. Whoever Strauss consulted before making his decision, it certainly was not the England Test squad. Many of them remain in touch with him. "Once your coach, always your coach," Moores says with a smile. "They know they can call me.

"Joe's words were appreciated. It was brave of him to say that at that time."

And yet, after two sackings and some treatment that can only be described as shoddy, Moores says he would still work for the ECB again. While he has not yet been approached for a role at Loughborough - an organisation that is about to have a radical overhaul - it remains highly probable that he will be. His eye for young talent, his record as a developer of that talent, and his ability to impart knowledge to other coaches, remain assets.

"Yes, I'd work for the ECB again," he says. "A role at Loughborough would be exciting. I love coaching and that would be working with the best players and coaches. Yes, it appeals.

"Professional sport can be cruel. Or maybe ruthless is a better word. You know that when you go into it. You are immersed in it."

His fault, as much as it is one, was his inability to play the media or political game. His failure to understand that style is as important as substance when it comes to selling yourself to the public. His failure to understand the dark side of the organisation that had employed him.

While a perception that he was closely aligned to an unattractive ECB regime - the regime of Downton and Giles Clarke that talked of people being "outside cricket" - no doubt hurt him, his main fault may well have been simply being a decent man in an increasingly indecent world. A man who thought that, if he worked hard, planned for the future and forged a strong relationship, it would be enough.

And that's the lasting impression of Moores. For whatever you think of his coaching - his international record is modest; his county and development record excellent - as a man, he has a dignity that is rare in professional sport.

A sense of perspective, too. After England lost to India at Lord's last summer, Moores was asked if he was at "rock bottom". His reply - "who knows what rock bottom is, but it isn't losing a cricket match" - sums him up better than anything else he said in his period at the helm. Even after his second sacking, he found a positive. "If feels as if I've got my wife and kids back," he said.

Following this interview, he went to see his son, Tom, a hard-hitting wicketkeeper-batsman, play for Nottinghamshire seconds against Warwickshire. The sacking has hurt, but he will cope. "A glass of wine helps," he says.

"I don't put this on," he says as the interview draws to a close. "I don't know if it's from my mum or what. But I am a calm person who can see the value of looking at people in their best light. It was such a slanging match last time. There were so many opinions. And so much of it was wrong. I didn't want to get involved. It's all so easy to do that. I'm not going down that route.

"I've been offered book deals, but it's not who I am. And if I did one, I would want it to be things I've learned and stories to help people get the best out of themselves and others. I have to be true to what I am. There's not a lot of mileage in negativity, you know.

"Of course it's been tough. This is the first summer for 33 years I've not been involved in the game in a professional way. But I'm a coach. It's what I do. I love England and I love cricket. The game doesn't owe me anything. It's been great fun working in it. And the hunger... it's just starting to come back."

Greece is a sideshow. The eurozone has failed, and Germans are its victims too

'This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets.' Photograph: Matt Kenyon

 Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Nearly every discussion of the Greek fiasco is based on a morality play. Call it Naughty Greece versus Noble Europe. Those troublesome Greeks never belonged in the euro, runs this story. Once inside, they got themselves into a big fat mess – and now it’s up to Europe to sort it all out.

Eurozone creditors raise hopes of Greek bailout deal

Read more

Those are the basics all Wise Folk agree on. Then those on the right go on to say feckless Greece must either accept Europe’s deal or get out of the single currency. Or if more liberal, they hem and haw, cough and splutter, before calling for Europe to show a little more charity to its southern basketcase. Whatever their solution, the Wise Folk agree on the problem: it’s not Brussels that’s at fault, it’s Athens. Oh, those turbulent Greeks! That’s the attitude you smell when the IMF’s Christine Lagarde decries the Syriza government for not being “adult” enough. That’s what licenses the German press to portray Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, as needing “psychiatric help”.

There’s just one problem with this story: like most morality tales, it shatters upon contact with hard reality. Athens is merely the worst outbreak of a much bigger disease within the euro project. Because the single currency isn’t working for ordinary Europeans, from the Ruhr valley to Rome.

On saying this, I don’t close my eyes to the endemic corruption and tax-dodging in Greece (nor indeed, does the outsiders’ movement Syriza, which came to power campaigning against just these vices). Nor am I about to don Farage-ist chalkstripes. My charge is much simpler: the euro project is not only failing to deliver on the promises of its originators, it’s doing the exact opposite – by eroding the living standards of ordinary Europeans. And as we’ll see, that’s true even for those living in the continent’s number one economy, Germany.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the noble pledges made for the euro project. Let’s play the grainy footage of Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and France’s Giscard d’Estaing, as they lay the foundations for Europe’s grand unifier. Most of all, let’s remind ourselves of what the true believers felt. Take this from Oskar Lafontaine, Germany’s minister of finance, on the very eve of the launch of the euro. He talked of “the vision of a united Europe, to be reached through the gradual convergence of living standards, the deepening of democracy, and the flowering of a truly European culture”.

 We could quote a thousand other such stanzas of euro-poetry, but that single line from Lafontaine shows how far the single-currency project has fallen. Instead of raising living standards across Europe, monetary union is pushing them downwards. Rather than deepening democracy, it is undermining it. As for “a truly European culture”, when German journalists accuse Greek ministers of “psychosis”, that mythic agora of nations is a long way off.

Of all these three charges, the first is most important – because it explains how the entire union is being undermined. To see what’s happened to the living standards of ordinary Europeans, turn to some extraordinary research published this year by Heiner Flassbeck, former chief economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and Costas Lapavitsas, an economics professor at Soas University of London turned Syriza MP.

In Against the Troika, the German and the Greek publish one chart that explodes the idea that the euro has raised living standards. What they look at is unit labour costs – how much you need to pay staff to make one unit of output: a widget, say, or a bit of software. And they map labour costs across the eurozone from 1999 to 2013. What they find is that German workers have barely seen wages rise for the 14-year stretch. In the short life of the euro, working Germans have fared worse than the French, Austrians, Italians and many across southern Europe.

Yes, we’re talking about the same Germany: the mightiest economy on the continent, the one even David Cameron regards with envy. Yet the people working there and making the country more prosperous have seen barely any reward for their efforts. And this is the model for a continent.

Perhaps you have an image of Deutschland as being a nation of highly skilled, highly rewarded workers in gleaming factories. That workforce and its unions still exist – but it’s shrinking fast. What’s replacing it, according to Germany’s leading expert on inequality, Gerhard Bosch, are crap jobs. The low-wage workforce has shot up and is now almost at US levels, he reckons.

Don’t blame this on the euro, but on the slow decline of German unions, and the trend of business towards outsourcing to cheaper eastern Europe. What the single currency has done is make Germany’s low-wage problems the ruin of an entire continent.

Workers in France, Italy, Spain and the rest of the eurozone are now being undercut by the epic wage freeze going on in the giant country in the middle. Flassbeck and Lapavitsas describe this as Germany’s “beggar thy neighbour” policy – “but only after beggaring its own people”.

In the last century, the other countries in the eurozone could have become more competitive by devaluing their national currencies – just as the UK has done since the banking meltdown. But now they’re all part of the same club, the only post-crash solution has been to pay workers less.

That is expressly what the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are telling Greece: make workers redundant, pay those still in a job much less, and slash pensions for the elderly. But it’s not just in Greece. Nearly every meeting of the Wise Folk in Brussels and Strasbourg comes up with the same communique for “reform” of the labour market and social-security entitlements across the continent: a not-so-coded call for attacking ordinary people’s living standards.

This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets – and the two are increasingly incompatible. Germany’s Angela Merkel has shown no compunction about meddling in the democratic affairs of other European countries – tacitly warning Greeks against voting for Syriza for instance, or forcing the Spanish socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to rip up the spending commitments that had won him an election.

The diplomatic beatings administered to Syriza since it came to power this year can only be seen as Europe trying to set an example to any Spanish voters who might be tempted to support its sister movement Podemos. Go too far left, runs the message, and you’ll get the same treatment.

Whatever the founding ideals of the eurozone, they don’t match up to the grim reality in 2015. This is Thatcher’s revolution, or Reagan’s – but now on a continental scale. And as then, it is accompanied by the idea that There Is No Alternative either to running an economy, or even to which kind of government voters get to choose.

The fact that this entire show is being brought in by agreeable-looking Wise Folk often claiming to be social democratic doesn’t render the project any nicer or gentler. It just lends the entire thing a nasty tang of hypocrisy.

On the English Cricket Board and insider journalists

What the papers say

by Maxie Allen  in The Full Toss • June 19, 2015

Over at our friends Being Outside Cricket, there have been some interesting discussions about the nature of the mainstream cricket press, its relationship with the cricketing public and its attitude to those of us ‘below the line’. You can read the pieces here and here.

At the risk of committing plagiarism, I thought I’d take the liberty of penning a few thoughts of my own. What follows is inspired by, not a response to, the thoughts of Lord Canis Lupus and The Leg Glance. I thank them for that inspiration, not to mention their wisdom and insight.

The misadventures of the cricket media are hardly new territory in our tier of the crickosphere. Many of the key points may already be very familiar to you, echoing hundreds of your own comments on both blogs during the last eighteen months. But we’ve not touched on the theme here on TFT for some time, and it’s worth updating our perspectives in the context of the here-and-now – the new mood of optimism and concord subtly washing over English cricket.

I believe there are three misconceptions about the nature of the cricket press. Firstly, I doubt all the principal correspondents have total editorial control over their copy. The editor is in charge of the paper, and beneath him or her is the sports editor. It’s they whom the correspondent is trying to satisfy, not only the reader. The bosses may ask for a particular editorial line, or at least a tone – upbeat, angry, patriotic, kick them while they’re down.

The space allocated for their reports will fluctuate according to the news agenda, with copy truncated by the sub-editors overnight if need be. If Jose Mourinho gets sacked by Chelsea, there will be less room for nuances about the third ODI. The words below the correspondent’s name will not always entirely be written by them.

That said, the more senior the hack, the more sovereignty they have. Mikes Selvey and Atherton, or Scyld Berry, are less likely to have their copy reworked than a junior reporter.

Secondly, the mainstream press do not write specifically for people like us, who read and write cricket blogs and follow the minutiae of every story. They aim at readers with a passing-to-serious interest in cricket, who have little spare time and probably read only a single paper. A city trader on the Tube. A van driver on his lunch-break.

This means complex stories get simplified – as happens in all branches of news. It also explains why journalists often put a postive spin on events, to the disgust of bloggerati sceptics. In their eyes, punters follow cricket for fun, as an escape from the drudgery of work. So hacks write about good news, and feats of derring-do, with an appeal to patriotism. They suspect too few readers are interested in the Byzantine plot-twists of ECB politics.

Thirdly, newspapers and websites (but not the BBC) are under no obligations to anyone. They are private publications, unsubject to statutory regulation which mandates fairness, balance, and specific editorial standards. If you don’t like a newspaper, so the logic goes, you don’t have to read it.

And we can’t always regard the cricket press as a uniform entity. Its exponents occupy a fairly broad spectrum, possessing a range of attitudes and approaches. Some have been more sympathetic than others to the laments of those below-the-line. A few have listened to, absorbed, and reflected our (often disparate) views.

All of this may sound like excuse-making. But there are a multitude of hefty ‘but’s. On the whole, the response of the established cricket media to the turmoil triggered on 4th February 2014 has fallen so far short of adequacy that no caveats amount to exoneration.

Newspapers and mainstream websites, along with broadcasters, enjoy many privileges. The ECB award them the status of ‘accredited’ media. This means their correspondents are appointed as the public’s eyes and ears, and receive seats in the press box, as well as interview access to players and staff, and off-the-record conversations with officials. Neither bloggers not readers are afforded such accreditation.

With privileges come responsibilities – chiefly, the duty to hold authority to account. You can’t have one without the other, especially when many papers regard themselves as ‘newspapers of record’. The inky press generally exudes a sense of entitlement and officialdom. “Because we’re the Daily X, we should be able to do y and find out z”. Once again, that right brings a responsibility.

With the Pietersen affair, the cricket media signally failed to hold the ECB to account. The ECB lied, and covered up their lies. It was as clear a case as you could imagine of misconduct and moral corruption by a public body. Yet this was barely explored and never properly investigated. Even material in the public domain was poorly studied. The ‘due diligence’ dossier passed by largely unremarked. Pietersen’s book was skim-read for lurid slurs while his serious accusations of ECB bullying and hypocrisy were ignored.

When vocal members of the public complained about this dereliction of duty, some pressmen replied by saying, ‘well we asked them, but they wouldn’t say’. This was a ridiculous excuse. In other spheres of news, the silence of authorities during a scandal becomes a story in itself. Front pages scream for answers. Newspapers ratchet up the pressure by cajoling third parties to provoke a response.

There were plenty of options available to the cricket press, had they been more tenacious and inquisitive. They could  have highlighted the blatant contradictions in the ECB’s own testimony. They might have striven for a whistle-blower. They should have piled pressure on the DCMS, Sport England (who give the ECB funding), and England sponsors Waitrose and Investec, to demand answers.

Unless I’ve missed something, none of this happened. Some journalists tried. A few tried hard. But no one tried hard enough. Too many approached the saga with all the forensic analysis of the lazy-thinking, cliche-reliant golf club bar-bore. They couldn’t see past Pietersen’s bad-egginess to the real story, and misconceived the saga as a debate about Pietersen the man, instead of what it was, a powder-keg of ECB malpractice and mendacity.

The recent explosion of the FIFA scandal provides an instructive parallel. While there is no suggestion the ECB or its officials have engaged in financial corruption or bribery, the misconduct of each organisation has common strands.

Both the Pietersen affair, and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, gave off an overpowering miasma of fishiness. In each case a bizarre decision was taken but never convincingly explained. Attempts at scrutiny were met with bluster, evasion, and arrogance. What had actually happened was not what was officially presented.

The British press, rightly sensing the truth, refused to let FIFA off the hook. Uncowed by Sepp Blatter’s snarls, they plugged away tenaciously, month after month, even after the original story faded from the agenda. The Sunday Times led the charge, their detective work uncovering a web of brown envelopes emanating from Qatari-FA linked magnates. The hacks kept up the pressure, and eventually the levee broke. Look where we are now.

When Blatter appeared at press conferences and argued black was white, the hacks tore him to pieces. By contrast, what happened in cricket? In April 2014, when Paul Downton emerged from hiding at the Moores press conference, and met questions about Pietersen with a risible stew of lies and obfuscation, the cricket correspondent of The Independent famously gave us this. 

----

Stephen Brenkley @stephenbrenkley

It took 10 minutes for Pietersen issue to be raised at Moores' press conference. Downton handled it with aplomb, as did Moores.

----

If the likes of Brenkley or Mike Selvey had covered the FIFA story, we’d have probably read something like this:

It is time to cease asking such impertinent questions of Mr Blatter, a good man who has suffered much unwarranted personal abuse.

The FIFA scandal demonstrates more than simply what can be achieved by tireless journalistic inquisitiveness. It proves that tales about corrupt sports administrators can be major box office and appeal to passing readers. And it shows the merit of pressmen fighting for their stories. There must have been times during the FIFA investigation when editors lost confidence and threatened to pull the plug and save resources.

But back to Pietersen. Not all journalists failed to ‘get it’. But too many did. And no one closed the deal. Why?

It wasn’t because readerships lost interest in Pietersen, judging by the sheer quantity of copy written about him. In some instances, editorial diktats, from above, could provide partial explanation. But surely no editor would have turned down a juicy story about skulduggery in the corridors of Lord’s if offered up a scoop on a plate.

The real reasons are several and over-lapping. Some pressmen were lazy, others too gormless to realise what all the fuss was about. A few were deterred by fear of losing access to the inner circle. But many were simply out of their depth. It’s one thing to write about batting technique or line and length. It’s quite another to cut through a dense thicket of political intrigue and obfuscation. A previous career as a professional cricketer does not in itself an investigative journalist make.

A number of hacks were guilty of blatant bias, which took various forms. They had a personal dislike of Pietersen. They were friends or former team-mates of Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Graham Gooch or James Whitaker. Correspondents were often reporting on the conduct of people they’d known personally for years. Within this incestuous bubble, objectivity was impossible. Broadcast interviews were suffused with matiness. It was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell hosting Newsnight.

Just as influential was a subtler and less conscious form of bias. Many former players now inhabiting the press box are cut from the same cultural cloth as the ex-pros who became administrators: workmanlike county stalwarts who never amounted to much at international level. Even if they didn’t realise it, those correspondents were always likely to empathise with the likes of Downton and Whitaker, see things from their point of view, and fail to probe.

By the same token, they were unlikely to view the story either from the readers’ perspective, or Kevin Pietersen’s. Pietersen, with his vast success, huge wealth, brazen ambition, and buccaneering flamboyance, became everything they never were. Unable to relate to him, the ex-pros naturally viewed the ECB’s position as plausible, inhibiting their curiosity. And it wasn’t only about empathy. It’s easy to sense in their copy their feelings of distaste for Pietersen’s brash and unclubbable angularity. But it went further. They resented him for his success – a success which held up a light to their own mediocrity. It’s not going too far to suggest that in several cases their journalism was corrupted by envy.

In the main, the press allied to the establishment, a total inversion of their proper role. They sympathised with authority instead of putting it under the microscope. This response stemmed from an inherent emotional alignment, between media and ECB administrators, for reasons more profound than the limited emotional imaginations of ex-professionals.

Journalists, players, ex-players, ECB apparatchiks, and mandarins, together form the Cricketing Class. All these people have far more in common with each other than with any of the spectating public. They inhabit the same biosphere, sharing press boxes, hotel lobbies, bars and airport lounges around the world. They mutually provide each other with parameters and reference points of conduct, acceptance and vindication.

The incestuousness of the cricket circuit explains much of the Pietersen failure, but also plenty more. Many, especially the ex-players, have little experience of professional life beyond cricket. Insulated within this cosy cocoon, a tranche of the cricket press long since lost touch with the people they’re writing for – members of the public who follow cricket as a pastime.

When was the last time any of them paid their own money to attend an England match? Mike Atherton, say, probably hasn’t since he was a teenager. How many of them queue up for a soggy £7.50 burger, when they can rely on the courtesy sponsors’ lunch, while watching every ball of play from the best seats in the house, not only for free, but paid to be there.

This being the nature of their working lives, for years or decades on end, it requires conscious effort to see things from a punter’s point of view. This is no more than a journalist’s duty, but few achieve it.

So they often fail to share the public’s healthy scepticism of the motives of those in charge, exemplified by their constant talk of “good men”, “working hard”, in “difficult jobs”. They lose track of vital consumer issues central to the supporters’ experience, from ticket prices to free-to-air television coverage. Mainstream mediacrats can’t imagine a world where you must pay £80 for a ticket, or £400 a year for a TV subscription, from limited means, just to watch the game in the first place.

I suspect this also explains why virtually no-one in the press box understood, and barely discussed, the impact of the ECB’s “outside cricket” jibe. When push came to shove, the hacks also regarded themselves as “inside”, treasuring their insider status and mounting the barricades against the revolt of the great unwashed.

This explains their defensive hostility towards readers who dared complain about their misconceived analyses and flawed reporting. Rattled by the impudence of outsiders questioning their judgment, a few openly insulted their own audience, in what must be a British media first. Several of Mike Selvey’s Tweets became infamous

----

mike selvey @selvecricket

Social media was a good way to pass on information. But the trolls, idiots and know-nothings make it unpleasant. So I'm out of here. Sorry.

mike selvey @selvecricket

Often hard for journos to remember they are read by many many more people online than few bilious inadequates who dominate comment section.

---

Selvey’s generation had failed to grasp the reality of twenty-first century media interactivity. In return for their custom, today’s consumers expect an equity share and a seat at the discussion table. They – we – visit mainstream websites to participate as much as to read. Cricket followers trust their own knowledge and judgement. They expect to hold the work of professional correspondents – who have chosen to put their heads above the parapet – up to scrutiny. And they can publish views themselves, via blogs or Twitter. You no longer need a job on Fleet Street to enter the public domain.

Every other branch of journalism realised this years ago. In cricket, though, few accepted the new deal and most were slow to realise how radically the interface has changed. Grandees raged against the dying of the light, firing arrows from their ivory towers towards the peasants storming the drawbridge. Their rhetoric of entitlement spookily echoed the ECB’s ‘outside cricket’ press release, with its bleats of “uninformed…unwarranted and unpleasant criticism”, which “attacked without justification” their “rationale…and integrity”. These patrician correspondents expected deference by virtue of their position alone, and met irreverence or opposition with pompous sanctimony and sour self-importance.

Others, however, were happy to engage with the public in a generous, constructive and cordial manner, on terms more – but never fully – equal. There lingered a loose sense of masonic, closed-shop sniffiness, which implied a belief that a human being is elevated to the rank of Approved Commentator on Cricket only through an elite process of divine selection.

In reality, cricket punditry is not akin to medicine or law, in which only hard-won professional qualifications confer authority. You can be right about English cricket even if you don’t have a badge on your lapel. This is ordained by the internal logic of the profession itself. If cricketers with no journalistic training can waltz into Fleet Street jobs, and journalists with no professional cricket experience can write about foot movement and bowling actions, why can’t any lifelong cricket follower have something equally useful to say?

The division between writer and writee was akin to clergy and laity. The common man could not be trusted to read the Bible in English because he was too simple to understand the word of God. Emblematic of a common press attitude were responses you could characterise as follows:

If you knew what I knew you would think the same. But I’m not going to tell you what I know. Why should I? In your position, you take my word for it. I am right because of who I am. You are wrong because you are on the outside. You are ignorant and uninformed, unlike me.

Such ripostes were usually fortified by reference to “sources”. In other words, the hack trumped a rebuke by claiming an insider had imparted to him an earth-shattering revelation, without ever saying exactly what. But what if that source was, without the hapless correspondent realising, telling them a load of complete bollocks? During the Pietersen nuclear winter, plenty of “sources” with agenda had every reason to spin a yard to their advantage. Because the press identified neither the sources nor the content, nothing could be scrutinised for its true worth. In the final reduction, anonymous vagaries were passed off as empirical evidence.

This story was not just about Pietersen, by any stretch. The competency of Paul Downton. The merits of Peter Moores. The legitimacy of Alastair Cook. Free-to-air television. Time and again, the agglomerate press circled their wagons of legitimacy and insisted they were right, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They branded as rabid freaks anyone foolish enough to reject their authority and disagree.

The more they lost touch, the more stubborn they became. And when opportunities arose to prove their good judgement, they gleefully taunted their own readers with boasts of one-upmanship. Desperate straws were clutched at. While thousands of sober, thoughtful critics, on BTL boards and Twitter, were dismissed as a baying, irrelevant, mob, a few hundred paying Ageas Bowl spectators who applauded an Alastair Cook innings were seized upon as representatives of the nation’s soul.

This wave of condescension and antipathy, directed by writers, and some broadcasters, at their own audiences, is unique in the history of British media. When bums start leaving seats, every other branch of journalism and entertainment responds by updating their product and raising their game. If X Factor viewers complain or switch off, Simon Cowell replaces the judges and refreshes the format. In cricket, if you don’t like what they do, they tell you to fuck off.

During the last few weeks, everyday life has calmed down. England’s exciting ODI performances, an opiate for the masses, have soothed the sceptic-hack relationship, at least for the time being. Victories are very difficult to disagree about, and the side’s upturn in fortunes since the removal of Cook and Moores has provided an (unacknowledged) vindication for the legions of BTLers who’d argued the duo’s inadequacy all along. Test cricket is another matter, though, and should Cook fail in the Ashes, trouble will flare up again.

In each of English cricket’s three estates – the administrators, the press, and the public – there is a decreasing appetite for conflict and strife, although this must not distract us from the vivid scrutiny the ECB’s conduct still demands. Contrary to what many journalists probably think, readers desire a positive relationship with the mainstream press. After all, we largely rely on them to provide our news from the front. They have access to people and events which we don’t. And ex-players will offer technical and experiential insights we may not spot with the naked eye.

But the relationship can only work if it’s bi-directional. In return for the vitals provided by journalists and pundits, we bring crowd-sourcing: millions of independent minds, views, and critical faculties, borne of millions of lifetimes spent watching cricket, playing cricket, and thinking about cricket. It’s a win-win. And to lay the first stone of this new Jerusalem, I suggest a little job-swap. A random punter should be granted a week in the press box, with all the trimmings. And during the same test, a Fleet Street correspondent should buy their own tickets and watch every ball from the stands, in the crowd. A change of scenery is good for the soul.

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance

Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph 6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015  

Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?

It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".

The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.

I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.

In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.

This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.

It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades. It demanded changes to the Spanish constitution.

When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.

Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.

The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.

One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake. But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30.

In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.

The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.

Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.

He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.

It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.

Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.

As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate.

They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.

Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.

It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.

As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."

The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.

The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.

The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.

But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?

Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.

The Pope can see what many atheist greens will not

George Monbiot in The Guardian



Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?

No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We permit industrial farming to tear away the soil, banish trees from the hills, engineer another silent spring. We let the owners of grouse moors, 1% of the 1%, shoot and poison hen harriers, peregrines and eagles. We watch mutely as a small fleet of monster fishing ships trashes the oceans.

Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty






.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘We have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost’.

I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of their bank accounts. Never has one hand appeared. Yet I see the same people base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we don’t protect the natural world.

Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.

I see the encyclical by Pope Francis, which will be published on Thursday, as a potential turning point. He will argue that not only the physical survival of the poor, but also our spiritual welfare depends on the protection of the natural world; and in both respects he is right.

I don’t mean that a belief in God is the answer to our environmental crisis. Among Pope Francis’s opponents is the evangelical US-based Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has written to him arguing that we have a holy duty to keep burning fossil fuel, as “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”. It also insists that exercising the dominion granted to humankind in Genesis means tilling “the whole Earth”, transforming it “from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city”.

There are similar tendencies within the Vatican. Cardinal George Pell, its head of finance, currently immersed in a scandal involving paedophile priests in Australia, is a prominent climate change denier. His lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation was the usual catalogue of zombie myths (discredited claims that keep resurfacing), nonsequiturs and outright garbage championing, for example, the groundless claim that undersea volcanoes could be responsible for global warming. There are plenty of senior Catholics seeking to undermine the pope’s defence of the living world, which could explain why a draft of his encyclical was leaked. What I mean is that Pope Francis, a man with whom I disagree profoundly on matters such as equal marriage and contraception, reminds us that the living world provides not only material goods and tangible services, but is also essential to other aspects of our wellbeing. And you don’t have to believe in God to endorse that view.

In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves, as Christians put it, surprised by joy: “A happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”

He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living world is essential to our psychological and physiological wellbeing. (A paper published this week, for example, claims that green spaces around city schools improve children’s mental performance.)

This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy proposes, is that there is a universal propensity to love it, which may be drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love can be provoked almost immediately, even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature, McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds.

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

Is this a version of the religious conviction from which Pope Francis speaks? Or could his religion be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes inspires in us? Conversely, could the hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament be a response to ecological boredom: the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our psyches?

Of course, this doesn’t answer the whole problem. If the acknowledgement of love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism in others, how do we translate it into political change? But I believe it’s a better grounding for action than pretending that what really matters to us is the state of the economy. By being honest about our motivation we can inspire in others the passions that inspire us.

Perhaps the world's conspiracy theorists have been right all along

Alex Proud in The Telegraph
 
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud


'I want to believe': Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) in The X Files Photo: 20th Century Fox
 

Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.

You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.

Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.

It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.

Photo: Reuters

This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
 
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.

So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?

The Iraq War

The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.

The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.

And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.

Fifa

The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.

Photo: AFP

On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.

The banking crisis

A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.

Paedophiles

This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now,it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.

And the rest

Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.

But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?

But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.

In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.