D Reilly

I found I spent most of the second half of the Rugby World Cup final thinking about an acquaintance. I had lunch with him last week. Three children in and 36 years old, he’d recently acceded to his wife’s request to have a vasectomy. As a reward – a kind of final hurrah for his hitherto unsullied vas deferens – at the last minute he’d decided, hang the expense, to fly to Tokyo to watch the match live. An ardent England fan, I don’t think it had really occurred to him – as it hadn’t to me – that England might lose. After the glory of Yokohama, where Eddie Jones’ boys mullered the fearsome All Blacks, spirited England were surely nailed on to thrash the Springboks and their negative style of rugby.

They say it’s not what you do or say that people remember you for, but how you make them feel. Jose Mourinho has spent the last few years, lately as manager of Manchester United but before that at Chelsea and Real Madrid, making everybody feel awful. Now, once again, he’s paid the price. Petulant, sulky, seemingly at all times very angry with everything and everyone, United under him seemed hell-bent not just on negating the human spirit, but also crushing it. They were boring to watch, disdainful of flare and, worst of all for this most romantic of clubs, utterly pragmatic (and not even very good at that). At the start of his career, Mourinho’s approach worked well.

If we were to discover Jose Mourinho lately fantasised during press conferences about mowing down the assembled hacks in a hail of semi-automatic gunfire while yelling at the top of his voice “SAY HELLO TO MY LEETLE FRIEND”, I think, on the whole, we’d understand. His rise, like that of the similarly arriviste Tony Montana in Scarface, has been both meteoric and, in its own way, violent, but now the white hot charisma that defined and propelled it seems very obviously to have burnt itself out. It must be hard on him. Mourinho’s arrival on the global consciousness in a shimmering aura of Latin arrogance back in 2004, all Hollywood good-looks and hair gel, was scintillating.

Can you be sure, dear reader, you haven’t inadvertently indulged lately in a spot of Holocaust denial? A little light Jew bashing? The problem with modern life is there’s so much to remember. Have I got my keys? Have I got my money? Have I apparently become a member of an organisation which is vocal in its support of writer Roger Garaudy – who claimed the murder of six million Jews was a ‘myth’? Have I got my shopping list? No one can be expected to remember every last thing at all times. We can, then, surely sympathise with Jeremy Corbyn’s discovery only last week that he was listed on its website as an international convenor of the Just World Trust, an NGO described by the Observer as a ‘trenchant critic of Israel.

Has Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman been assassinated, had a breakdown or gone into hiding? Or is that just wild internet conjecture? I ask only because he has barely been seen in public since prolonged heavy gunfire was heard at the royal palace in Riyadh in the middle of the night on April 21. At the time Saudi state media dismissed reports on Twitter and elsewhere the shots were the sound of a coup taking place, insisting instead the semi-automatic gunfire was merely aimed at a recreational drone that had flown too close to the palace walls.

Do we separate the art from the artist? When Billy Jean comes on, do we tap our foot any less vigorously because of what singer Michael Jackson purportedly got up to behind closed doors? The ‘Jesus Juice’ and the out of court settlements on child molestation charges and the many photos of naked children discovered in his belongings? My guess is we don’t. Likewise, do we celebrate Floyd Mayweather’s total mastery of boxing without considering his lengthy history of assaults on women? Perhaps we do. After making mixed martial artist Conor McGregor look utterly ordinary over ten rounds of boxing in Las Vegas on Saturday night to extend his professional record to 50 wins and no losses, Mayweather was asked how he would like to be remembered.

Middle age is OK by me. National Trust membership, a Waitrose loyalty card, lying on the sofa drinking red wine and yelling at the telly — since I turned 40, this stuff all just feels right. But by a mile, the best consolation of middle age I’ve found is the cagefighter Conor McGregor and living vicariously through his kicks, punches and verbal smackdowns. How dull my previous enthusiasms for cricket, tennis and football now seem by comparison with the heroic derring-do of this 28-year-old killing machine, a former plumber from Crumlin in Dublin. It’s not just the sheer honesty of the sport he has mastered or the megawatt charisma he exudes every time he opens his mouth (sample quote: ‘Whoever said it’s tough at the top is talking absolute shite’).

Is there a whiter place in London than Barnes? I ask only because I have been going there at the weekends for the last two years to buy artisan chocolate croissants and artisan coffee from a favourite artisan café (artisan is metropolitan for expensive), and to let my daughter bother the ducks at the picture perfect pond on the green. In that time I’ve been amazed by the lack of people of colour I have encountered. Once you start noticing you can’t stop. By my reckoning, in those two years I’ve seen only two people of colour in Barnes. A black man on a bike riding down the high-street, and an Indian-looking man working in the newsagent. I am not making this up. Everyone else I’ve observed in Barnes has been white. Not white like you see outside of London.

I have been called every name under the sun by a great many people since my defence of Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger was published in the Spectator on Thursday. Naturally, most of the abuse has been online, but a little came my way on more traditional media. A caller to BBC Radio Ulster, for example, branded me 'disgusting'. My favourite insult came from Piers Morgan, whom I admire tremendously. Without any trace of irony, he dismissed me to his six million Twitter followers as an 'agent provocateur'. But perhaps, coming from him, this wasn’t really an insult. According to the vast majority of my abusers, my crime was not my support for the embattled Wenger, although it must be said not everyone agreed with my position.

Lance Armstrong could yet manage to emerge a hero. 'What’s the crime?' is all he needs to ask. 'Who died?' On one side, a lot of people interested in the somewhat esoteric topic of who can make a bicycle go fastest were conned. On the other, more than half a billion dollars raised to fight cancer. Which is more important? 'Oprah, I cheated. I cheated to beat a field full of cheats. You got me. But I used my profile to fund research into finding a cure for the greatest killer of our time. If I wasn’t winning, that wouldn’t have happened. You do the math.' Why didn’t he just say that? Again and again, Oprah asked him about the lies, seemingly amazed that anyone would ever cling to an untruth. Armstrong, with a winning forbearance, tried to explain.