Spot the (sports) story . . .

IT always comes as a shock to beancounters when negotiations with editors over World Cup or Olympics travel budgets founder on the same rocky argument.
“But you’re sending a team from the sports desk AND a team from the news desk,” wails the Man in the Pin-stripe Suit. “Surely it’s a sports story and can be covered by sports writers?”
“Not so,” replies the editor. “The sports writers will simply cover the sport.”
“Perfect!” yells the frantic money manager. “You’ll get what you want and we’ll save half the costs.”
“Afraid not, old boy,” says old smoothie-chops. “What we will GET is the organisers’ PR . . . what we will MISS are the bust-ups, the drugs scandals, the misbehaving WAGs and the drunken orgies.”
Mahogany Row sees sense in the end, of course: they agree to half the budget you asked and, as your application was for double the amount required, honours are even.
The Triesman Affair, on the other hand, was what one infamous Sun editor would have called “a reverse ferret”. The Mail on Sunday sting that ousted the noble Labour Lord from his chairmanships of the Football Association and of England’s team bidding to host the 2018 World Cup was a rather tawdry kiss and tell, obtained by means of a recording device hidden upon the person of a self-styled ex-girlfriend.
Now, if an editor is prepared to sidestep the tenth commandment of the PCC’s Code of Practice (Thou shalt not “seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using clandestine listening devices”) then we might at least expect a little more than a one-sided account of the old guy’s snogability in the back of a Wembley passion wagon.
Because, as one of Britain’s best investigative reporters yelled down the phone at me, “That was NOT the story!”
Since we worked together on the Express in Manchester in the Seventies, Andrew Jennings has spent forty years as an investigative reporter and documentary film maker. He’s a Panorama reporter now, with a string of glittering prizes including a Royal Television Society Award for his Channel Four investigation into Olympic corruption. That said, Jennings prefers to boast of the six-year ban imposed by a vengeful IOC and the current ‘freeze’ he’s suffering in dealings with FIFA President Sepp Blatter.
In other words, he’s a man worth listening to. So I listened.
“There’s something funny about this whole episode,” he began. “Stings are definitely an in-house, DIY operation. You don’t trust amateurs. You would NEVER ‘buy in’ a sting, that’s not something we’d ever do at Panorama.
“If an alleged ex-lover came to you with a tape you’ve got three choices: turn her away, turn her over or toss her a fee and investigate the allegations yourself with your own people.
“You trust your own staff, your fake sheikh or whoever. What you need is an experienced team that can get the story and who know what to do if and when it goes pear-shaped.”
Unsurprisingly, the MoS was letting its scoop do the talking: “he might think that but we couldn’t possibly comment”, was the official response from Peter Wright and his triumphant crew. But in Derry Street’s nearby watering holes journos shrugged off criticism of their tradecraft.
As they see it, this was a case of a slighted old flame getting lucky: she records the conversation to prove their relationship and, in the process, the head of the FA and World Cup bid badmouths the Russian and Spanish FA.
Kerr-CHING! It’s jackpot time.
To be fair to Wrighty and his team, the MoS did follow up their scoop a week later with a spread on bribery at the top of the international game.
Meanwhile, Jennings dismisses the scorn sports writers poured on Triesman’s claim that Russia might be prepared to help Spain pay off referees in the 2014 Wold Cup in exchange for Spain supporting Russia’s bid in 2018.
“Vladimir Putin is determined to stage the World Cup. It’s like a Big Willy contest with other world leaders but the difference is he’ll put money behind it. He won’t just go the extra mile; he’ll do a global circuit.
“He’s already won the 2014 Winter Olympics for Russia [at Sochi, a Black Sea resort] and now he wants the World Cup in 2018.”
Jennings is irrepressibly confident that there really is a big story behind the Triesman tittle-tattle. “I talk virtually every day with fellow journos, ‘football blazers’ and spooks,” he says. “This sort of talk comes up all the time.
“Too many sports journalists say nothing, afraid that if they spill the beans they’ll ‘lose access’. I’d warn them to produce or they’d lose their bloody jobs!
“It is utterly hypocritical of these self-regarding reporters to utter faux rage over Triesman's comments when such allegations are common currency in every press box, every bar and wherever a hack meets another hack, inquiry agent or football official.”
Strong stuff! But I commend to you the Jennings unrelenting output which so enrages the sporting Establishment.
It can be found on the maverick award investigator’s website at www.transparencyinsport.org.


I CAN’T help feeling that Murdochs père et fils have a hit list of enemies they’re working through in alphabetical order: having done their best to blitz the Barclay Brothers and bombard the BBC they’re now aiming their bile at the British Library.
Young James’s attack on the Library’s plan to digitise and make available behind an online paywall three centuries of Britain’s national newspaper collection is surely both outrageous and – in the widest sense of the word – antisocial.
One cannot copyright history, which is what news becomes almost before it reaches the breakfast table; even literary and musical masterpieces eventually pass into the public domain.
If the public’s right to access library-stored information cuts across the Murdochs’ quite reasonable determination to charge for their newsgathering investment then the answer must be some form of statute of limitations.
Let News charge for today’s Times and twelve months of archive access. After that, log on to the Library.

First published (well, MOST of it) in the Press Gazette, June 2010

Why don't toffs 'get' public transport?

PUBLIC transport has been a battleground for politicians since Boadicea drove a cart and horses through the Romans.
Berwick’s MP, Sir Alan Beith, is currently pursuing Northumberland’s transport department to find out why our local taxpayer-subsidised bus company increased fares and cut timetables a month ago without any local consultation or even notification (we only became aware of the changes when buses failed to appear!).
Down south, ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone has launched a campaign to regain the mayoralty of London from Boris ‘The Blonde Bombshell’ Johnson, citing bus fares as The Big Issue (up thirty per cent since Boris took the wheel, though still a damn sight cheaper than Northumberland’s).
Both should be wary, though: climbing on the bus bandwagon has stalled many a promising political career.
Legend has it that Thatcher Cabinet Minister Nicholas Ridley’s attempts to get matey during a visit to a Newcastle bus garage ended in failure when he asked the drivers if they took their buses home at the end of a shift.
Similarly, in 1923 the Conservative Party had to choose between Lord Curzon and Stanley Baldwin and a colleague advised the noble lord to “get closer to the people by taking a ride on a London omnibus“. The intrepid Curzon, former viceroy of India, fluffed the mission.
When asked by the conductor, "Where to, guv?", he replied: "42 Berkeley Square, please".


WHO’D be a journalist? You’re damned if you do and dumb if you don’t.
Last week, to spare a child’s grief by reporting the death by drowning of her pet hamster, I carefully changed the names of all involved - hamster, child and her mother - just in case the little girl was upset to discover her furry friend had met its end by falling into the toilet bowl.
The Press Complaints Commission might be impressed by my gentlemanly journalism, but I need not have bothered. Wee Emily, our egg collector, saw through the subterfuge straight away and is now touring Tillside asking how anyone can trust anything a journalist writes when he can’t even get a hamster’s name right!


THE henhoose is all a-flutter, like High Noon when the midday train is due to arrive. And cowering in his coop is Rocky the Cowardly Rooster.
Rocky has been a poor replacement for our agri-business’s original team leader: where the late Jock the Cock bossed and bullied hen and human alike -- he never gave up an egg to Wee Emily without a fight -- Rocky was henpecked from Day One. And now that word is round the hen run that a cockerel thief is stalking the village he’s barely visible.
Two fighting cocks have already fallen victim to the menace that haunts Ford village: John at the Lodge and Roy the Gardener have both seen their ‘hen-forcers’ snatched in moonlit raids, never again to call the faithful to their nest boxes with a cacophony of dawn choruses.
It’s unlikely to be a fox. After all, why take on the fighting cock when not a single hen has been harmed?
So Rocky is quaking in his corn bin at the thought that he might be the Cockerel Catcher‘s next victim. Watch this space . . .


MY toughest assignment since being boss at the Daily Mirror? The job I’m doing this month, editing BOG News, a quarterly magazine distributed to members of Borders Organic Gardeners.
I’m guesting in the hot seat while the newsletter’s esteemed editor, Robert Latham, is away and it‘s a hard row to hoe: planting parsnips replaces Page Three girls, tips on composting instead of kiss-and-tell tales . . . I am out of my depth.
One old tabloid habit dies hard, however: the pun. An article on potato growing across the Channel is introduced under the headline ‘Jacques Tattie’s French Collection’!
I don’t think BOG will ask me back . . .

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, June 4 2009

Why hamsters need toilet training

SNUGGLES (not her real name) is, or, rather, WAS a hamster, as I discovered from her obituary on the internet social site Facebook.
My friend Alison (again, tediously, not her real name for reasons which will shortly become clear) had written: “Snuggles escaped again last night, but sadly one adventure too many: I've just found her floating in the downstairs toilet. Have hidden her in the shed as Charlotte has friends coming for tea tonight before Cubs. . .trauma!”
What is it with furry creatures and water? When my children were small a neighbour found them and some friends playing happily in her kitchen while what looked like a rat crouched in a corner beside the dishwasher.
Quick as a flash, Ruth scooped up her dustpan, felled the creature with one blow and raced down the hall to the bathroom where she deposited the flattened corpse in the toilet and flushed it away.
Minutes later a second neighbour appeared at her door with a weeping child in tow.
“Ruth!” she screeched, beseechingly. “Tell me you haven’t done what Simon says you’ve done to his pet gerbil!”
Anyway, back to Facebook, which is where I seem to get all my bad news these days. Having shed a tear for Snuggles I then find a former News of the World editor friend of mine – whom I haven’t been able to contact since she disappeared a month ago, SUPPOSEDLY to write chapter six of our joint newspaper novel – sharing grubby jokes online with the Sun’s ex-Royal reporter!
Frankly, it feels like infidelity.


THE Outlaw is back in the village so I’ve left home and moved in with her while the missus is away.
It’s not as bad as it sounds: the Outlaw is Gemma’s mother, who’s just spent a month in .hospital having her broken hip pinned and has been allowed home while Gemma is in Provence following the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture trail (she said if I mentioned Goldsworthy ‘cultural types’ would understand).
They’re a pair of one-offs, the Outlaw and ’Er Indoors, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction. “While you’re here you can set up my new computer,” growled the Outlaw.
Yes, at 94 and (only temporarily) slowed by a healing hip she’s bought a whizzy new computer set-up to keep in touch with children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren across the world.
Truly, a woman batting towards her first century and a whizz-kid a heart!


WERE you surprised that Sarah Ferguson was recorded asking for half a million quid in exchange for an introduction to her ex-husband, the Duke of York? I can’t say I was.
That’s the way people in public life behave nowadays. It’s only six weeks since three Labour Cabinet Ministers were taped by Channel Four as they negotiated fees for introductions and lobbying services. Would that have been for what they knew or for WHO they knew?
Ken Clarke wasn’t long out of government in 1998 when he gratefully accepted the deputy chairmanship of British American Tobacco, a company accused of using dubious strategies to promote its products in Third World countries.
Would that have been because he was a QC and a celebrated cigar smoker? Or because he knew the right flesh to press?
And Tony Blair? Don’t get me started on Britain’s newest multi-millionaire. He’s not content with his peacekeeping role in the Middle East, his seven-figure consultancy salary from the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase and his £400,000 an hour speeches on the international lecture circuit.
Now he is to lend his expertise and his ‘global relationships’ to Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valle technology company. For love or for money? “Not pro bono,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
And we’re worried about Fergie?

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 28 2009

My tactical voting teach-in

TWO weeks on and they’re still infected with election fever down at the Red Lion.
“Never mind yon bus timetables you wrote about last week, Banksy,” thundered the good Farmer Morebottle. “There are issues of state still requiring answers.”
Well, you know me: ever prepared to selflessly give of my time and great wisdom I hunkered down with a pint and a bowl of peanuts and took questions from the floor at Young Farmers’ Night. This is how it went:
Old Bob: “Who’s representing ME in the Coalition Cabinet? Two thirds of them went to Oxford or Cambridge, only four are women and none of them is working to a manifesto any of us voted for.”
Me: “Well said, Bob; the Cabinet is indeed unrepresentative educationally and by gender. At the same time, half the population must be, by definition, of below average intelligence; let’s just hope the Cabinet is non-representative in THAT aspect, too.”
It is, in fact, extremely unlikely that Bob, my domino partner, would have been persuaded to cease exercising his drinking arm for long enough to exercise his civic duty. But I digress . . .
The Byreman (who has been gloating ever since the Fat Cats’ and Foxhunters’ Alliance won office): “Boris Johnson says the Coalition is like a cross between a bulldog and a Chihuahua. Do you agree?”
Me: “No. I see it more as a marriage of pit bull and muzzle.”
At this The Byreman exploded and headed off to fetch a four wood from golf bag to “teach me a lesson”.
“Don’t worry,” cooed Billy the Kid, soothingly. “I play golf with him every Friday and I’ve yet to see that four wood connect with anything.”
Nevertheless, the kerfuffle brought our General Election inquest to a premature end with important questions left unanswered. Such as: How will the Liberal Democrats of Thirsk and Malton vote next Thursday in an election that was delayed by the death of the UKIP candidate?
It’s a safe Tory seat where a Labour man ran second in 2005. A fortnight ago tactical voting brought about a national coalition government, but two weeks is a long time in politics and protest votes are all the rage.
Supporters of both ruling parties who disapprove of the unholy alliance – and there are many – might well vote Labour ‘just to show ’em’.
Then true blue Conservatives and diehard Lib Dems could really stand united . . . behind the red rosette!

THE High Court decision to grant BA an injunction to stop the latest air crews’ strike on a technicality offers just the precedent we need for a re-run of the General Election: not every voter was correctly registered, some people had more than one vote and hundreds – maybe thousands – were prevented from voting.
Or do General Elections not have to be held to the same high standards as union strike ballots?

I STOPPED a man on a train from bellowing into his mobile phone the other day by pretending I thought he was talking to me.
“Absolutely!” I muttered, when I could take no more of it. “I couldn’t agree more.”
His eyes narrowed. He glared at me and lowered his voice. But only a little.
“You’re SO right!” I cried, nodding vigorously in his direction and giving him the thumbs-up.” It did the trick: he scowled, mumbled a little Anglo-Saxon into his mobile phone and hung up.
The fightback against noisy mobile users gathered pace this week when the new Prime Minister announced that mobiles and Blackberrys must be switched off in Cabinet.
Why stop there? We’re quite used to wifi hotspots as the only places where wireless broadband works . . . why not jam mobile phone signals in restaurants and public buildings and instead construct pavement buildings, painted red with windows for safety and providing perfect mobile telephone reception for all networks?
Then we could call them . . . phone boxes!

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 21 2010

Keeping the bus-tards honest...

YES, I know it’s only a couple of days since the new PM (Poor Man) accepted the poisoned chalice but I’d like to be the first to protest . . . And yes, I DO know that Cleggy and Campo have hardly had a chance to get their feet under the table at Number Ten. Nonetheless, I’d like to register the First of the Summer Whines.
After all, it is occurring on their watch. And Mrs Banks and I blame Cameron’s Big Society.
Something terribly sneaky, you see, has happened to our village bus. They’ve put up the fares. They’ve cancelled a couple of runs. They’ve retimed the rest.Without asking – or even telling – a solitary soul!
Word first got out about the altered timetable when a lady from Branxton told ’Er Up In Arms how she’d waited for a bus that “never came”. Actually, it did – but (uselessly) twenty minutes after its long-advertised time.
The parish council knew nothing about the change. Neither did our post office, which has always been the designated stop in Crookham.So Mrs B boarded the next bus to Berwick to find out for herself.
Sure enough, times had changed, one trip had been abandoned altogether and the fares had gone up. And all of this had happened three weeks earlier.Nothing advertised in The Journal or the Berwick Advertiser. Nothing even in that waste of space, money and manpower the county council mischievously calls ‘Northumberland News’.
The timetable confusion is extraordinary:
VISIT the bus company’s website and you will find a timetable dating back to September 2006.
CALL at Berwick’s Tourist Information Office and you’ll be given a ‘slimmed down’ schedule which omits any reference to Branxton, Crookham, Duddo, Felkington or Shoresdean. It tells you where the bus starts and finishes its trip but gives no indication of which route it follows.
My check call to the operators, Glen Valley Tours, confirmed the changes. Confusion still clouded the question of cost: the receptionist quoted £2.80 as the new single fare (“It’s gone up 20p or 30p, I’m not sure which”) but she was unable to remember the new return fare.
“If you ask for a return on the bus you might get a discount but it won’t be much.”
The bus driver told us different: £2.60 single and £4.80 return is what HE charges.
So here’s why I’m getting steamed up: the 267, like other scheduled services in Northumberland, is subsidised by the taxpayer through Northumberland County Council. The service is not cheap, especially compared with heavily subsidised big city services like London and Manchester.
Londoners pay just £1.20 per bus trip to travel anywhere in the capital, with a daily £3.90 cap on bus costs. Under-18s pay just 60p per trip with a £1.95 cap.
Less advantaged north Northumbrians – with far fewer transport alternatives than their big city counterparts – struggle to meet comparatively colossal bus fares. With the minimum wage set at £5.80 per hour (or £3.57 for under-18s) daily travel can represent a hefty percentage of earnings.
It’s not so much a Big Society we need, Campo, as a joined-up one.
In the meantime don’t bother asking the bus company for a timetable, get one from the bus driver. And pay the fare HE asks rather than the price Glen Valley suggests!

WHEN fat cats telephone hoping to part you from your hard-earned, how do they KNOW who they’re talking to?
“Is Mrs Banks at home?” the Man from Barclays asked. “No,” I replied. “Can I help? I’m her husband.”
“Afraid not,” said the banker. “Is her brother available? [the siblings handle my elderly mother-in-law’s affairs]”.
I thought quickly. “Yes he is…hang on.” Pause. Change of voice. “Hello?”
“Ah, Mr Newton . . . I just wanted to go over a few things . . .”
Ridiculous, this security charade. Isn’t it?

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 14 2010

Dopey decides General Election!

SO, at last it’s over. Can Toon and Country lay claim to having been scrupulously fair throughout all the bigot-bashing, name-calling, head-in-hands horrors and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths moments? I think so.
As you read this I will be settling into my headphones onstage at the University of Chester preparing to take part in day-long BBC Radio Five coverage of the General Election fallout, whereto I have been summoned to provide a taste of North-east opinion on the outcome.
Frankly, loosening the fairness leash a little will come as a welcome relief. The past five weeks have been very trying.
My domino form at the Red Lion wasn’t helped by the eternal sniping from the Byreman and those bibulous old Tory farmers he hangs out with. Calling every drawn game “a hung parliament” hardly smoothed things over, either.
And my earning power was frequently reduced when the BBC, agonising over compliance with its Charter, would cancel planned studio debates because some redneck journalist of the Right had pulled out, thus destroying the careful political ’balance’ demanded by the party spin doctors armed with stopwatches.
Naturally, The Journal and its editor have been entirely, nit-pickingly fair in their approach to election coverage and I pay homage to the spirit of decency blah-blah-blah…( as you can see from the above, dear reader, my annual contract negotiation is underway).
Anyway, as I was saying, the Great Pow-wow is over, at least until we grow to hate the next lot and demand they, too, face the guillotine. I hope you’re happy this morning. I can almost certainly promise you that I’m not.
So to cheer us all up, I was going to unveil my favourite, least-politically correct election joke. But even that has been stymied.
“I think NOT, Banksy,” said The Powers That Be when I submitted my column for perusal. “Britain might still be counting the votes if the result is as tight as everyone thinks it will be.
“This so-called joke,” said t’Editor, painfully puncturing my week’s work by metaphorically consigning it to the spike, “is hardly presented in the spirit of fairness, honesty and decency.”
So I argued. I pleaded. And finally (contract negotiations being at a ticklish point), I capitulated and rewrote my political joke “snowy white“, naming no names, in the spirit of fairness (and in exchange for an extra five quid on my fee). Here goes...
Hi-ho! Hi-ho! The Seven Dwarfs left for work early each morning, leaving Snow White at home to do her housework. As lunchtime approached, she would prepare their food and carry it to the mine.
One day as she arrived at the pithead with lunch she saw that there had been a terrible cave-in. Tearful, fearing the worst, Snow White began calling out, hoping against hope that the dwarfs had somehow survived.
“Hello? Hello!” she shouted. “Can anyone hear me? Hello!”
For a long time there was no answer but just as she was giving up hope Snow White heard a faint voice from deep within the mine, singing: “Vote for Change!”
Snow White fell to her knees, sobbing and praying.
“Oh, thank you, Lord!” she wept. “At least Dopey is still alive!”
By the way, if you think that’s still a bit one-sided try the bolshie old Byreman’s definition of the word ‘bigot’: Brown Is Gone On Thursday!

POLITICAL correctness now stretches to food where kids are concerned: sell-by dates consign cases of yoghurt to the kitchen bin, day-old bread can’t even be used for toast, cheese with a rind is “off”, they insist.
Only the poverty brought on by leaving home adjusted my pair’s commonsense acceptance of the Real World, but I wonder what even they would make of the remedy for mouldy jam that I found in Marguerite Patten’s 1968 Every Day Cookbook the other day?
“Remove the mould from the jam, tip the remainder into a pan and boil hard…use VERY quickly!”

First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 7, 2010

Shirley's show must go on...

THE show, as the old saw has it, must go on. Come hell, high water or hot volcanic ash a duty, once undertaken, must be completed.
Sez who? Well, my Daughter the Actress for one: dedicated to her art, she once gamely dragged a theatrical surgical boot upstage and down throughout a Tennessee Williams play, ignoring the torn knee ligaments her dedication brought on early in Act Two.
Fans of Queen, Pink Floyd and Three Dog Night understand the maxim, too; it booms out of their soundboxes through the eponymous singles those bands respectively produced.
Carrying on regardless may be courageous but it’s not always comforting. At the high point of one cultural expedition to the Hackney Empire to hear the Moldovan State Opera play La Boheme (a contest La Boheme won hands-down) ’Er Indoors and I suffered agonies for the lead tenor who missed his top notes and coughed over the lower range throughout the first act.
”I so sorry,” he pleaded, after stepping bravely through the curtain at the interval. “Haff sroat veddy bad, much hurt.” The politely sympathetic ovation that followed dried to a slow, horrified handclap when he added: “But neffer fear, I carry on!”
I find myself in a similar dilemma. For two months I have eagerly anticipated interviewing Baroness Williams of Crosby (Shirley, as was) tonight at the Queen’s Hall, Hexham, as part of the town’s book festival.
Last Sunday I was laid low by a chest infection, a hacking, hurtful cough bad enough to cause me to miss my dominoes at the Red Lion. On Monday I visited the doctor then took to my bed, popping antibiotics and sucking on a lung-clearing inhaler.
My contact with humankind has been limited: I bumped into the Byreman at the chemist’s shop in Coldstream and he directed me out into the street “where we can talk in the fresh air and not surrounded by your bloody germs.“ What a friend!
My old agricultural pal Ronald ‘Demon’ Barber didn’t even notice my spluttering discomfort when we met as I travelled home via the Cornhill shop,
“Cereal prices are on the floor,” he growled. “Thank God for the EU money.”
Doubtless he’ll still be voting Conservative next Thursday, however!
Anyway, on the eve of my theatre date with the noble lady - and despite a second visit to the surgery for a change of medication - I’m still wheezing like a steam engine and scaring the local sheep with my bark.
So here’s my dilemma: we have a full house turning up tonight (so much so that Mrs B and her old school friend Mary Clegg will have to perch on chairs backstage), it’s too late to brief an understudy and I’m determined not to let anyone down, particularly Baroness Williams.
Besides, ‘Shirl the Pearl’, as we tabloid types used to label her, has a fascinating life story to tell.
The woman many believed would be Britain’s first woman prime minister abandoned the security of the Labour Cabinet to join the Gang of Four in setting up the Social Democrats, forerunners of today’s Lib-Dems. Easy to see that 29 years later - and one week from tonight - she might finally witness the breaking of the political mould.
But there‘s so much more to Shirley: for instance, did you KNOW she once worked as a waitress in Whitley Bay? Or that the one-time tomboy’s ambition to become an MP was, at 20 years of age, acerbically dismissed by Lady Astor with the words: “Not with THAT hair!”
So say a silent prayer that my tonsils hold out and that my coughing fits don’t drown out Baroness Williams and drive her audience to distraction. For this is one show that MUST go on.
Who, after all, could let a little thing like a chest cold cost him his front row view of history?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, April 30, 2010