My news and social media feeds are filled with two things today – Peter Mandelson’s disgrace and Pep Guardiola’s latest Gaza outburst. Inaccurately blathering on about Israel committing a “genocide” whilst being paid by Qatar is sanctimonious hypocrisy. It is not the same as covorting with a sex trafficking paedophile. Obviously. What is similar is the way the media has fawned over these two rich, powerful men, failing to call them out, swept up by their charm.
Mandelson has enraptured Wsstminster for decades. Sky’s Sophy Ridge hit the nail on the head in this tweet, writing:
[In Westminster] status is everything… what stories can they give me… how can they further my career? The personal and the professional become blurred. And Peter Mandelson is the embodiment of that. Charming, well-connected, gossipy. In the inner circle. If we’re honest with ourselves, that’s the reason he’s been allowed to fail and then be rehabilitated so many times.”
I’ve never met Mandelson. The closest I got was when he was doing a live appearance with his (now presumably former) co-hosts at the Podcast Show London. Undoubtedly, he had an aura about him. Hilariously self-deprecating with deadpan delivery. You can see how it might have served him well with journalists over all these years.
Asks Tought Questions of Pep Guardiola as Well as Peter Mandelson
The power dynamics seen in politics are not all that different in sport. Who knows the transfer dealings? Who can tell me what’s really going on in the dressing room?
For sports hacks, Guardiola can do no wrong. The Man City boss is the genius who changed football. Why bother asking him about the connection between those who pay his salary and atrocities in Sudan? (He even mentioned Sudan at the end of his latest speech.) Why flag to him the slavery orchestrated by his paymasters? He served as an ambassador for the Qatar World Cup for goodness sake, a point, in fairness, made by Richard Williams in this Guardian Sportsblog piece.
This is not to say that people in sport cannot have political opinions, or that they shouldn’t express them. We’re a long way from “shut up and dribble”. However, if you want to step into that world, you should expect to be scrutinised. Properly. Journalists should be prepared to ask those questions, just not what the latest team news is.
It is nerve-racking sitting in press conferences or doing interviews with powerful people, knowing you have to ask them something horrible, all while a press officer glowers at you. That is kind of the job, though. Plenty of journalists, whatever the beat, do it really well. Yet some characters are better at avoiding the scrutiny. They get the “soft landing” Ridge referred to. Whether it is Peter Mandelson or Pep Guardiola, we all need to be wary of that, because retrospective handwringing is no longer good enough.