My thoughts in Conservative Home on the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar:
Extract:
My track record in football punditry is not a great one. In all the years that I held a season ticket at Aberdeen, I never once successfully predicted a Dons scoreline. And back in the 1980s, my schoolboy self tipped Tottenham for the league title. That’s still to come true. No surprise, therefore, that I once dismissed tiny Qatar’s bid to host the World Cup as pure fantasy.
In fairness, no-one really saw that one coming. But the extent of corruption later exposed at FIFA went well beyond the suspicions many harboured. As did its determination to see through a controversial tournament said to have claimed thousands of lives in the construction of multi-billion dollar infrastructure.