Robin Oakley

As political editor of the BBC I once had to appear on the Today programme just after the 7 a.m. news to discuss the passing of an MP who had tragically died experimenting with auto-eroticism. Two minutes before we went on air I was still engaged in a conference call with BBC executives anxious as to whether I would mention the women’s stockings he was wearing or the orange in his mouth. I never had such interference when I was reporting on political skulduggery: what concerns BBC managers is ‘image’ and whether the Corporation might finish up in the newspapers. Similar thinking has had much to do with the BBC’s pathetic surrendering of its coverage of major horse races such as the Grand National and Royal Ascot.

The first I heard of the recent death of Norman St John Stevas was from a questioner after I had delivered a lecture on Margaret Thatcher aboard a liner off the Chilean coast. What came immediately to mind was the story of Mrs T. dispatching one of their fellow Cabinet ministers to tell Norman that he really must stop his dreadful name-dropping. The emissary, I believe it was Chris Patten, duly delivered the message. Lord St John, as he was to become, theatrically clutched his brow and said, ‘Oh, my dear, you’re absolutely right. That’s just what the Queen Mother was telling me last night.

After a lifetime reporting politics, I am as well accustomed to spin as a washing machine. But a rich new example reaches me from the US. Researching her family tree, a Californian discovered that she shared a great-great-uncle, Remus Reid, with a US senator. Unfortunately, the great-great-uncle was a regularly convicted horse thief and train robber whose only remaining photograph was the one showing him on the gallows platform before he was hanged. She wrote to the Senator seeking any information he had on their shared relative. An aide replied that Reid had been a famous cowboy whose business empire grew to include ‘equestrian assets’ and ‘intimate dealings with the Montana railroad’ and who had devoted years to ‘government service’.

I was birdwatching the other day with a jolly Methodist minister who had only ever once been to a racecourse. Knowing nothing of the sport, in the first race he had backed an outsider called something like Holy Orders, purely on the name, and collected. He put most of his winnings on The Lord in the next. Alas, it came nowhere. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘the only time in my life I have been let down by The Lord.’ The Lord clearly hadn’t noticed either that last Saturday’s card at Newbury promised the best jumping fare this season, the Cheltenham Festival apart, and it was frosted off. It left me free to conclude the final chapter of a book about the Flat trainer Clive Brittain, which has been a joyful experience.

He didn’t quite tap the side of his nose but, looking around and dropping his voice, one of the best-connected racecourse informants I know greeted me at Cheltenham on Saturday with the news: ‘Alan King has got the sniffles in his yard.’ Striking a line through all the inmates of King’s Barbury Castle Stables on my racecard, I paused only to put a circle round Baby Mix, Paddy Brennan’s mount for Tom George in the first. ‘Paddy says this is the best novice he’s ever sat on,’ my informant had also confided. Unfortunately, nobody had told Baby Mix, one of the ante-post favourites for the Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival in March.

Every sport needs renewal and the most heartening thing about this jumping season is the growing prominence of a bunch of comparatively new, comparatively young trainers. A little older than some is the phenomenon John Ferguson. Moonlighting from his worldwide role as Sheikh Mohammed’s chief bloodstock adviser on the Flat, he has set up as a jumping trainer and had 18 winners from fewer than 50 runners, an extraordinary strike rate. In Wales Tim Vaughan goes from strength to strength, matched in the Cotswolds by Martin Keighley. Then there are the ex-Lambourn Likely Lads, a bunch of successful horse-handlers who were all assistant trainers there and did their courses together.

I am sorry but if anybody else asks, ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’ they are in danger of me dotting them one. I arrived back with Mrs O. from two weeks lecturing abroad to discover that the neighbour to whom we had lent one house key could not find it. The builder holding the other hadn’t received our text asking him to hide it in a secret place. After two hours in a café there was no option but to burgle my own home through an upstairs window. It then took an hour’s negotiation to get the security firm to help me switch off the alarm deafening our neighbours while they insisted on me giving them a code number they had never supplied.

Racing brings in all sorts. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie came by the family route. He used to help his blind father write out his bets every Saturday and the family would be shushed into silence as the racing results were read out on the radio. One Saturday the results were delayed for a broadcast address by the then Archbishop. ‘Turn him off, unctuous old bugger,’ said Runcie’s father, clearly having no clue what direction his son’s career would take. My father didn’t bet and nobody took me racing, but I was hooked early too. We lived  next to the long-defunct Hurst Park racecourse near Hampton Court.

When he was awarded the Cartier award of merit for his lifetime contribution to racing, trainer Barry Hills insisted that racing should continue to be fun, and if that meant a little bit of skulduggery then so what. It drew the biggest applause of the evening. It has been a bizarre year for the racing community who exist in a strange limbo somewhere between sport and business. The racing itself has been fun. When the young pretender Long Run took on two former Gold Cup winners at Cheltenham and beat both Denman and Kauto Star, the race had everything: power, athleticism, canny professionalism, youthful exuberance and sheer class.

As she walked towards a Palace dining room once in company with the playwright Noël Coward, the late Queen Mother noted his gaily lascivious eye flickering over the Guardsmen lining the stairs. ‘No, Noël,’ she admonished him before he had spoken. ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. They count them before they put them out.’ Following the end of the Flat season, I have to do my own counting and it is not the happy story it was last jumps season when our Twelve to Follow showed a 50 per cent profit. Between them our Flat twelve made 41 racecourse appearances and from those they mustered six victories, six seconds and four third places. The star was William Haggas’s Green Destiny. Gambled on heavily at Royal Ascot, he was hampered and lost the plot.

Here is one for the experts at pub-quiz racing nights: which well-known jumps trainer has scored twice at Royal Ascot without yet registering training a winner at the Cheltenham Festival? Answer: Paul Webber. His glorious Cropredy Lawn yard near Banbury turns out a stream of decent hurdlers and chasers most winters — think of Flying Instructor, De Soto and Imperial Cup winner Carlo Brigante — but never seems to have much luck at the Festival. Meanwhile, from his comparatively rare forays on the Flat Paul can point to Royal Ascot victories on the Flat both with Ulundi (who also won a Scottish Champion Hurdle) and Full House. In March this year, 99 per cent of the racing world was convinced that things were going to change.

Two weeks ago I was in Quebec lecturing on, among other things, politicians and drink. The best moment in my research was encountering a Canadian blogger who declared, ‘We’ve had more abstainers than drunks in our Prime Minister’s office. The country has been reasonably well run, but Jeez, it’s been dull.’ It certainly hasn’t been a dull fortnight in racing as controversy has raged about the new rules on use of the whip. From Canadian waters, noting that jockeys such as Frankie Dettori and Tony McCoy had backed the reforms, I welcomed them too. I still back reform. Racing needs public approval and bigger crowds and the public response to whip use has to be heeded.

Trainer Sir Mark Prescott once noted that the greyhound races for the anticipated pleasure of sinking its teeth into a fluffy white bunny tail ahead. The human athlete races for the hope of fame and riches. But what’s in it, he asked,  for the horse? One thing that has been in it for the racehorse has been the coercion of the whip, the fear that if it doesn’t do its utmost a wallop or two will follow, the hope that if it does stick its head down and go all out that little demon on top will stop belting away. It wasn’t a reasoning that worked particularly well for me at boarding school. The masters and matrons who wielded cane or slipper, in some cases with obvious relish, only made me stroppier. But racing folk have clung to the old theories.

Seeing me leaving the races early one day recently a friend inquired why. ‘Got to finish some painting,’ I replied. ‘Oh, really,’ he said in surprise. ‘Do you do watercolours or oils?’ I would have said, ‘No, walls,’ but he might then have imagined I did murals, so I had to explain that, surrounded as I am by plumbers installing new heating, bricklayers repairing our chimneys and electricians trying to trace the wiring in our 1797 abode, I  have been trying to save a few pennies by  doing the home decorating. But economies, alas, don’t always live up to the theory.

It is not only the Arabs who have an intimate, almost mystical involvement with the horse. In Istanbul for the Topkapi Trophy, sitting beside the largest kebab I have ever seen (and, I kid you not, it was more than 12 feet long), I was reminded by my genial host Mehmet Kurt that the horse was special to the Ottomans, too. Their warriors, he insisted, were unbeatable. They never changed horses and their equine partners often saved their lives with their uncanny ability to anticipate and counter the enemy’s moves. There was perfect synchronisation of thought and movement between horse and warrior.

The lovely thing about Hayley Turner is the girl-next-door quality which she retains despite having become Britain’s highest-profile woman jockey. But while she still sounds genuinely surprised about her achievements her steady gaze reflects the inner confidence she has always needed to mix it with the boys. Most stables in the country would have to shut down if they lost their female staff overnight, and this column has banged on for years about giving women riders the opportunities they deserve. Now Hayley has added a second Group One, the Nunthorpe on Margot Did, to her breakthrough July Cup victory earlier this season.

I could not understand on Saturday why a fairly standard Newbury card had brought so many vehicles on to the approach roads. All was explained when I saw a group of merry ladies pulling knickers out of their handbags and comparing them. The old Welsh belter Tom Jones was appearing on stage after the day’s racing and he still gets ladies of a certain age waving their underwear at him. I do hope, though, that on such a breezy day those were spare pairs on display. The so-called ‘Party in the Paddock’ went with a zing, rather more so than the dinner party reported on last week by one of our favourite guests. On that occasion the claret had proved rather better than the conversation.

Qatar at Goodwood Goodwood works. No course in Britain looks prettier on a summer’s day. No course in Britain feeds the media better. Trainers agree that no one looks after 300-year-old turf better than Goodwood’s Clerk of the Course Seamus Buckley. And Goodwood always has an eye to tasteful innovation — the first course to have broadcast commentary back in the 1950s this year staged a celebrity ladies’ race which took racing on to the front pages when it was won by toothsome top model Edie Campbell. Spending the full week on the Sussex Downs this year presenting CNN’s welcome new international Winning Post programme gave me the chance to see Frankel at his incomparable best.

Some alien force keeps attacking my laptop. Every few seconds my anti-virus security system pings me with an audible warning of attempted forced entry, a process which paralyses all thought and makes working in a library impossible. It clearly isn’t a hacker from the News of the World, so who could it be? My wildest surmise, rapidly dismissed by a sceptical Mrs Oakley, was that after the success of last winter’s Twelve to Follow some crazed punter is trying to get at my sources of information. With what I lost at Royal Ascot this year, good luck to him, although it has to be said that the Flat Twelve aren’t doing too badly.

Lambourn trainer Sylvester Kirk retains the distinctive tones of his native Donegal/Tyrone. There was just one moment during his eight years as assistant to Richard Hannon, a period which coincided with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when he wondered if the accent was going to leave him alive. Deputed to drive the Hannons to Windsor for lunch with the Queen, Sylvester became confused driving out of the castle premises. Suddenly he was brought abruptly to a halt, the stable-spattered car surrounded by armed men with weapons cocked which definitely weren’t loaded for pheasant. ‘At that point,’ he says, demonstrating an impressively anodyne mumble, ‘I feared I might get shot simply for opening my mouth.