Any other business

Lenin and Sid Waddell provide words to describe the leader of the Tube strike

15 September 2007

Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank.

Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank. ‘Go on, you are, aren’t you,’ his mate insisted, pumping my hand. ‘Hiya, Sid.’ Thanks to an on-board internet connection and Google Images, I was able to prove to my new friends that I was not the veteran metaphor-mangler of television darts commentary. Nevertheless the three of us agreed that I might just have been mistaken for him across the fog of a crowded club in pre-smoking-ban days, and I felt a strange affin-ity with my newly discovered lookalike. I shall certainly be dipping into his new book, Bellies and Bullseyes (Ebury Press), and I was delighted to hear him on the radio on Sunday morning in the unfamiliar role of political commentator. As the son of a Northumberland miner, Sid was holding forth in eloquent defence of Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT union whose strike disrupted the London Underground for two days last week, at great cost and irritation to the capital but without winning any significant concessions for RMT members. I found myself siding with Sid — and disagreeing with almost everyone else who has opined on this topic, including Will Hutton of the Observer. It’s not that I empathise with Sid’s rose-tinted nostalgia for a lost era of working-class solidarity. It’s just that I think Bob does a service to society by reminding us how economically and socially destructive the era of union militancy really was.

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