Bon viveurs who need a good dose of reality

IF REINCARNATION gives me a second shot, I'm coming back as a lobbyist. You know, like those guys who collect votes to bring events like the Olympic Games and the World Cup to Britain.

In all modesty, I reckon my credentials are almost impeccable.

I love constant air travel first-class, of course. I never get jetlagged.

I adore five-star hotels, where they bring your crumpled suits back in pristine condition inside an hour. I like nothing more than lavishly entertaining new friends in top restaurants at someone else's expense.

I enjoy wearing a dinner jacket at British Embassy and High Commission receptions overseas where, after a couple of dry martinis, I am quite capable of flattering the gargoyle wife of some influential foreign VIP whose vote might be crucial to Britain.

If there's a flaw in my c.v. it is foreign languages. I speak only execrable third-form French and very bad Russian.

Actually, this isn't much of a handicap since all German, Korean, Greek and Venezuelan sports administrators and most foreign hotel servants now speak far better English than you will frequently hear on BBC Radio 5 Live.

The ultimate beauty of being a British sports lobbyist is that you are accountable to no-one and no-one expects you to win anyway.

OK, a few people are a bit narked this week because our football Argonauts spent Pounds 10million in failing to secure the 2006 World Cup for England but what did they expect when the campaign was launched on hot air, a patronising attitude and deceit?

It was par for the course.

Both Manchester and Birmingham launched huge charm offensives around the world to bring the Olympic Games back to Britain.

The lobbyists had a wonderful time - it is an axiom of economics that when you're living on expenses overseas you're not dipping into your personal bank account back home but these were exercises in futility from the outset.

Anyone with a glimmering of understanding of the International Olympic Committee knows that Manchester and Birmingham will never stage an Olympic Games under the present voting system. I was reviled after writing this when their respective representatives were out there wining and dining the world and take scant pleasure from being proved right. As it stands, the only British city which could conceivably host an Olympics is London.

The World Cup 2006 project was rather different. We do have wonderful stadia, we do have organisational ability, we do have the infrastructure.

What we don't have any longer is a hugely-powerful and influential figure inside the game.

We have lightweights, newly-appointed executives and disastrously-appointed politicians who don't know how the business works.

I shall not go on about Tony Banks, whose absurd posturing as Sports Minister was much ridiculed in this space, whose attempt to blame a hostile and negative British Press as a major factor in our 2006 shambles was predictable but I would reckon that his political career has now hit the buffers.

The behaviour of England fans in Belgium may well be a convenient excuse for our failure to stage the World Cup but that was the least of it.

We didn't know the ropes, we didn't understand the heavy politics. We sent lovely men like Sir Bobby Charlton and Sir Geoff Hurst out there to charm the world but it takes more than a couple of personable soccer knights to win these things.

Next time I shall offer my services. Salary, all expenses paid, life of Riley for a couple of years. Crestfallen expression when we lose. Send for the next waiter, please.

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I THINK I have found an opponent for Mike Tyson's next fight. His adopted name is Charles Bronson (above) and earlier this week, as Britain's most violent and disruptive prisoner, it took 24 prison officers in riot gear to quell his objection to solitary confinement.

Actually, I am not terribly interested in boxing but I would certainly spend a Pounds 12.99 cable television fee to watch a confrontation which would probably leave one or other of these contestants stone dead.

WHY BOYCOTT ARTICLE IS A MASTER-STROKE

THIS week's Spectator magazine carries an article of great significance. It is by Leo McKinstry, a frequent contributor to this newspaper and the author of Boycs, The True Story, a remarkable more than warts-and-all biography of Geoffrey Boycott.

It suggests that Boycott, a more than useful England batsman, was utterly incapable of hitting an ex-girlfriend, Margaret Moore, at least 20 times in the face an alleged offence for which a French court found him guilty, fined him Pounds 5,300 and gave him a three-month suspended term in prison.

The sentence was far more ruthless than that. Boycott was dropped from mainstream British television and radio cricket commentary, at which he is very good.

I have known Geoffrey Boycott since he first played for England on a tour of South Africa in the 1960s. He's a friend whom I have abused in print as a miser and a difficult man but I have written letters to lawyers saying I know Boycott was not guilty of the offence as charged. He is an immensely strong man and had he hit Miss Moore 20 times, he would have killed her.

McKinstry's article, in a publication brave enough to publish it, is a masterpiece. It deserves to reopen a court case in which I believe an unpopular England cricketer has been falsely accused.

PUBLIC SPAT HAS DONE GOLF NO GOOD

LIKE anyone who loves golf, I am much disturbed by the uncivil war which has broken out in this most normally civilised of games between Mark James, our most recent Ryder Cup captain, and Nick Faldo, the most successful golfer in British history.

Of course, there are frictions in international golf as there are in all other sports.

Usually they remain hidden but on this occasion they were thrust into public view by James' book, Into The Bear Pit. It contained what was little less than a character assassination of Faldo.

The book was ghost-written by a good friend of mine who reports for a rival newspaper - and I don't blame him for making the most editorially of some controversial remarks, including how James received Faldo's good-luck letter ahead of the last Ryder Cup and threw it into the bin.

That's journalism. That's how sports biographies hit best-seller lists.

But, in my opinion, that was a disgraceful betrayal by James of confidential correspondence. I have written here recently of other sports administrators who have cashed in with books disclosing locker-room secrets for money.

It is a new source of income and I deeply regret that Mark James has gone down that avenue. He will meet with Faldo next week and I hope they resolve their differences before this escalates still further.