Ecclestone gets some help from Mandy

Tankus

Bernies rich ...so Mandy is investing in favours, to be drawn after the political apocalypse of the next elections

Simon Birtwistle

I lost all respect for Bernie Ecclestone a very long time ago. He runs Formula 1 like it is a toy, created to amuse him, and he seems to have little to no connection to reality.

I am amazed that the competitors in Formula 1 put up with him. There are few other sports managed by quite such a bunch of inept people as Bernie and Max Mosley. It's high time someone competent took over.

TrevorsDen

Its because of the useless "way that he could command a lot of people able to get things done" that Germany lost the war.

If people had been able to say 'no' to him then Germany would probably still be sole ruler of Europe even now -- instead of having to share that role with a liberated France.

Vulture

Ecclestone - bizarrely for a successful tycoon - always appears an innocent abroad in the world of politics. One would have thought his experience in the sticky world of Nu Liebour over the tobacco advertising 'bung' would have innoculated him. But no. Ah, well, there's no fool like an old fool.

Ray

Stick to motor racing, Bernie.

CS

Mind you, what do you expect if you ask a question as bloody stupid as "do you have a favourite historical dictator?"?

Perhaps someone would care to name a dictator for whom it would be acceptable to admit an admiration.

Susan Hill

It doesn`t matter a jot about Formula One.. it's only an expensive sport. It does matter that ANY public figure whose opinion is invited by the press should voice such things - which are, apart from anything else (and it is a big 'apart from') uninformed and ignorant - and simply plain wrong.
But then, he consorts with a man called Mosley. Imagine what their private conversations on the subject of politics must be like.

Charles

Perhaps Mandy has a particular figure in mind, in need of some serious campaign funds, who could assume the Presidency and might run things in Europe more to Bernie's liking?

The Huntsman

"One wonders why he is doing that."

1. Ecclestone remains, despite his marital problems, a stonkingly wealthy individual;
2. Labour is broke;
3. It is likely still to be broke next year;
4. There is a general election next year (provided McStalin does not delcare an 'emergency' and suspend the constitution);
5. General elections are expensive things;
6. Ecclestone gave money to Labour once before, though that particular donation went distinctly pear-shapoed as a cloud of sleaze descended upon it;
7. Mandelson is none too particular where donations come from;
8. Helping this obnxious little man out of the hole he has just dug for himself might just be met with a handsome acknowledgement of his gratitude.
9. A cheque for a million quid can be in the post before you can say "Mandy for PM!"

Simple really.

Jeremy

I don't know who chooses the photographs that accompany these rolling news items on the Coffee House but, generally speaking, they are doing an excellent job. They have a very good eye for the photographic portrait - for the telling (and revealing) facial expression.

Anyway - that face. Gawd 'elp us. He looks like an extra from "Shaun of The Dead".

My understanding is that Ecclestone and Max Mosley have only just managed, by the skin of their teeth, to patch up the rift in F1. Statements like those made by Ecclestone to The Times - the old zombie should be told - are likely to undo their efforts in a trice.

And his remarks about Baroness Thatcher were extremely insulting - she happens to have been a faultlessly democratic leader of great personal integrity. And being of that generation of Britons who endured the Second World War, for Ecclestone to bracket her with Hitler is a profoundly offensive and insensitive thing to do. What a clumsy, vulgar, rough and insensible man. I hope that I never have occasion to be sat across the table from a face like his.

Lambert Simnel

It seems that Bernie is suffering from the same 'height complex' as Hitler and Napoleon... if this is to be believed I am going to the Aegean this year - and an island much smaller than Crete. I would love to know how easy it is to update blogs out there. I am worried that http://moralorder.mediumisthemess.com/blog

Victor NW Kent

Bernie Ecclestone looks a lot like Phil Spector. Are you sure you have the right idiot's picture?

Steve.W

Lord Peter Longtitle and his choice of friends gets ever more interesting. Let us not forget FI, tobacco money, Tony Blair and Nulabour all had a jolly coming together not so many years ago.

As Bernie Dumbostone likes dictators perhaps the unelected Deputy Prime Minister has begged him not to sound off about EU politics just prior to the Irish second referendum!

chris

He's old, he's money and power motivated, his wife is divorcing him, he lives in a complete parallel universe, and everyone in F1 suck up to him because he is there. And controls it.

F1 is now a massive global spectator enterprise, and less deveoped but emerging countries have been very keen to get in on the act. Bernie has been able to persuade them to pump lots of cash in, which he then creams off a nice top slice for the managing bodies and the teams.

A very nice business model, which has worked wonderfully, but is now a bit exposed because of the financial meltdown.

Occasionally Bernie focuses on the real world, like recently announcing that the British Grand prix will return to Silverstone next year if the Donington project fails, having previously said that there would be no Grand Prix if that happened. (This is presumably because he realised that a few F1 fans would morph into snipers and pick him off at the first opportunity)

Mr Green

As an aside, and I am hoping that somone here can add some meat to this, but I heard that Bernie started off his career running a very small BMW motorcycle shop in Bexleyheath, North-West Kent.

Could that be true?

Vulture

@ CS: There are plenty of admirable dictators. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was an excellent one: he dragged Turkey kicking and screaming into the 20th century without massacring his oppponents, and his state essentially endures to this day. Getulio Vargas of Brazil wasn't bad either. Nor was Pilsudski of Poland. Bernie, of course, being a bear of little brain, would not have heard of any of them!

Hawkeye

"Peter Mandelson has been offering Ecclestone advice on how to deal with the situation. One wonders why he is doing that. "

Mandelson...money

moth....flame

'nuff said

TomTom

Its because of the useless "way that he could command a lot of people able to get things done" that Germany lost the war.

Really ? I thought it was because the combined industrial output and manpower of the USSR + The British Empire + USA was able after 5 Years of war to wear down the German Reich...

Sir Graphus

They say you get the face you deserve. Does anyone think that Bernie would have that pinched, mean expression on his face if he'd spent a lifetime helping ladies across the road and inspiring children.

Businessmen like Ecclestone tend to like dictators; they can tie up a huge deal with 1 man who is unlikely to be voted out of power in 3 years. No inquisitive journalists etc etc.

Glyn H

Ecclestone has a very dodgy background, seemingly stealing a business from which he originally traded, and eventually stole Formula 1 from the RAC who ran motor sport in this country for many years. Mandelson is similarly casual with others money such a billing the taxpayer for improvements to his constituency home after he had announced his resignation as an MP. And being new labour they love a flash self made men such as Ecclestone Levy. Although Labour said they sent a cheque back to Ecclestone for the £1m donation that does not mean he ever cashed it. And there is an election looming. What this administration has done is outragous in umpteen fields and this little item is no surprise at all. By their deeds so shall ye judge.

Verity

Either Alice Thomson or Rachel Sylvester asked a breathtakingly stupid question. Why would there be an assumption that anyone would have a "favourite historical dictator"?

And why add the word "historical" as though that they were dead somehow shrove them of their cruelty? How off-centre is that?

Ask a moronic question, and the interviewee, momentarily thrown, is likely to say anything just to provide an answer.

I think you should save your contumely for Thomas and Sylvestor for ineptitude and smarty pants stupidity.

And taking up CS's point, how far back in time is the limbo pole for dancing under with a respectable dead dictator? Would Ghengis Khan be OK, and if so, why?

Simon Birtwhistle, you are bitter by what right? Doesn't Formula One belong to Ecclestone? If so, he can do anything he bloody chooses with his private property.

What a stupid thread.

Frank P

Verity

"Simon Birtwhistle, you are bitter by what right?"

Wouldn't you be if you had been lumbered with that moniker?

Kevyn Bodman

I disagree with Susan Hill (11.38am).
It doesn't much matter what a public figure thinks; public figures have just the same range of ideas, from idiotic to wise, as others do. They shouldn't be censored just because the opinion holder is well-known.
Ecclestone's ideas are no more, or less, idiotic, than if he was anonymous.
Maybe his expressed ideas are offensive. So what.
There is no right not to be offended.

I don't know the facts of F1 ownership; but I strongly support Verity's view,although most days I'd have expressed it without the intensifier, of what the owner of private property can do with his own property.

But I can't improve on Verity's denunciation of the journalists' 'breathtakingly stupid'and 'moronic' question and their 'ineptitude and smarty-pants stupidity.'

Kirsty

He says utterly stupid things to the F1 press every other day, so does Max, nothing to see here.

Verity, he doesn't actually own F1. You obviously don't follow the sport and have no idea what you're talking about.

TrevorsDen

Dear Tom Tom, it looks like my earlier reply did not get through, so an apology to all if it now turns up twice

Hitler ignored Rommel by forcing the Panzers to stop and thus allowing the British to escape (thus keeping them in the war and a base to liberate Europe.

His generals did not want to attack Russia at all - thus bringing in the industrial output and manpower of the USSR.
When he did he fatally delayed it by attacking Greece first, then he ignored his generals by delaying the attack on Moscow. Both contributing to the effective failure of Barbarossa.
His generals did not want to attack the Caucuses and Stalingrad and they did not want to attack at all in 1943, never mind at Kursk where the German army was shattered.
Hitler regularly refused his generals leave to withdraw to sensible lines.

Hitler declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbour thus bringing in industrial output and manpower of the USA.

Verity

Kirsty, I believe I am as qualified to talk about the vapidity - not to say dull-witted malice - of those two journalists as other people, including those who watch the mind-numbing sport of "motor racing".

I believe I am as competent to defend freedom of speech - and freedom of thought - as anyone else.

I don't understand how the nature of the sport in which he is involved invalidates Ecclestone's right to freedom of speech.

George Laird

Dear All

I think poor old Eccelstone thinks if a dictatorship comes he will be one of the elite of the New World Order.

He might find himself in a Gulag under the watchful eye of a Ernest Kranklemann type.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

Jeremy

"He told Alice Thomson and Rachel Sylvester that democracy was over-rated and trotted out some crass cultural determinism."

I've heard that song before. It's from an old familiar score...

Lord Mandelson was quoted as making some similarly disparaging remark about representative democracy on this very site. And, of course, Ecclestone has been talking to Mandy. So no prizes for guessing where he got that from. These people are nothing short of a public menace.

The bedrock of democracy is an educated population. Where the education system fails to educate, there fails democracy. In other words, it is Labour's systematic dumbing-down of educational standards which has degraded democracy in Britain. But if the Mandelson/Ecclestone view of representative democracy is typical of Labour's High Command, then you can understand why they have chosen to take this path. A dumbed-down population is far easier to dominate through spin and manipulation than is an educated and therefore more critical population.

Their approach (and its aims)are profoundly anti-democratic.

Alf Tupper C.R.O.F.

Hang on a minute. What happened as a result of Hitler's actions was appalling we all know that and don't need to fly our credential flags just for the show of it.

But the way he led Germany out of the catastrophe of the Thirties: that surely was an accomplishment and should be worthy of admiration on its own merits.

Ecclestone does qualify his statement albeit clumsily and vaguely; making it clear that he does not condone the ends to which Hitler came.

Most of the comments here seem to be of the 'don't say it and it will go away' variety, which serves to stifle free debate and thought.

john miller

Bernie has a weird sense of humour.

Mandy is sliming up to him because rumour has it that Bernie didn't bank the second cheque (who remembers the second tranche of £1million he gave to Tony?) that the Labour Party returned to him. Having kept the first one , natch.

Given the state of Labour's finances, even the interest over the last 12 years on the original cheque would come in handy.

Really, Bernie underestimated the number of professional offendees there are now. Most of them paid for by us.

You really have to wonder whether Python, Pete and Dud and the first incarnation of Mr Frost would ever have been born in the current world of Rightthink.

john miller

Oh, and Glen H if you think the dear old RAC ever owned F1...

Still, never let facts get in the way of an opinion, eh?

TomTom

Trevor's Den - it still took 5 Years and Hitler was funded by New York and London bond markets. He invaded Poland using Renault trucks and Russia using Czech Skoda heavy weapons.

The first Messerschmitt flew with a Rolls-Royce Kestrel engine. It is true Hitler did not want war with Britain but with the USSR - it was Chamberlain's success that he declared war on Germany and gave Hitler the USSR as an ally.

It was Lord Gort who saved the British Army after Belgium surrendered secretly exposing Antwerp to Panzer envelopment by retreating to Dunkirk before being boxed in.

Hitler was probably relying on Lord Halifax and RAB Butler to begin negotiations on an armistice as France had done. It would have been logical. Churchill gambled - he had only 6 weeks of Forex left to pay for imports.

Without Indian Army troops Britain would have been defeated - after all, neither USSR nor Britain had any military victory before 1942 and only then because of overwhelming superiority in equipment