My friend Lord Triesman may have done us a favour
Along with Tube closures and long traffic jams, the Sunday newspaper exposé has become a traditional part of the British weekend.
It usually works like this: a moderately foxy, slightly used-looking woman shops an older man in a suit to a paper. There are some blurry photos of man-in-suit and moderately-foxy-woman together, followed by pictures of the woman by herself with a prissy expression, saying spurious things to justify her betrayal. She walks off with the loot; he gets the sack.
Mostly, I view these stories with a combination of fascination and disgust. This one, however, arouses in me a combination of fury and hope.
The fury probably springs partly from the fact that I know Lord Triesman, who is one of the most interesting and thoughtful people I have the pleasure of counting as a friend. That he has lost his job over this episode is grossly unfair. Anybody can see that it is she, more than he, who is in the wrong. Gossiping with former colleagues is what normal people do. Recording your conversations with friends and selling them to newspapers, richly illustrated with pictures of your text messages, is what horrible people do.
I'm sure those feelings are shared by everyone who has read this story. I suspect that fewer people will sympathise with my other reaction. I'm full of hope that Lord Triesman's indiscretions have reduced England's chances of getting the World Cup in 2018. If he succeeds in sinking England's bid, he will have done this nation a great service.
It seems to me bizarre that we should want to commit ourselves to hosting another nightmarish sporting extravaganza when the consequences of the Olympics are becoming horrifyingly clear. The bill has already risen from £2.4 billion to £9.3 billion. At a time when the Government is going to start cutting things the country really needs, covering east London with handball arenas and velodromes seems a curious way to use our scarce public funds.
Experience elsewhere of the combination of the Olympics and recession is not encouraging. Greece's Olympic splurge for the Athens games in 2004 contributed significantly to its catastrophic financial problems. With pointless sporting facilities boosting similarly horrifying budget deficits, Britain and Greece have more in common these days than a shared interest in ancient marbles.
Next month's World Cup is proving a burden to South Africa. It is begging for help from Fifa. Of course Britain, unlike South Africa, has plenty of stadiums. But new ones will have to be built and crumbly ones restored. The bill is bound to tip into billions.
And it's not just the facilities that are going to cost taxpayers. There are promises of putting £750 million into "grassroots football" around the World Cup— ie people kicking balls around at the weekend.
Why I should pay for other people's hobbies is beyond me. I enjoy bird-watching, as do millions of other Britons, but we twitchers do not expect the state to buy us new binoculars or pay us to stalk flycatchers.
If David Triesman's ousting helps Britain escape the World Cup, I shall be glad. But I'm sorry that a man who has done little wrong can lose his job because a treacherous "friend" decides to betray him.
Emma Duncan is deputy editor of The Economist
