It was just a straightforward dinner in the bosom of the House of Lords, talking to members of the Jockey Club. What could possibly go wrong?
When I rashly accepted with gay abandon the invitation to speak to them after dinner, I’d forgotten that I’d been quite punchy about the club over the past decade in the Daily Telegraph. Forgotten, that is, until I arrived at the Victoria Tower Gardens gate to the welcoming grunt of: ‘Well, you’ve been bloody rude about us in the past, so let’s see what you’ve got to say for yourself now.’
I could see one of the more senior members of the club was itching to give me a good whack with his walking stick. Fortunately I think they’ve tightened up the rules on how many times you can hit an insolent hack without giving him opportunity to respond, but I didn’t fancy finding out.
‘Must say hello to the Baroness,’ I gabbled, and hotfooted it to the bar. Not that I could drink. Now I don’t consider myself to be an alcoholic, but boy oh boy would a martini have slipped down nicely to settle the nerves. The trouble is one leads to two, and that’s an even number so you have to have three, and before you know it, things are getting out of hand. So I drank orange juice. Eugch. Terrible vintage.
The Baroness Harding of Winscombe is the top dog at the Jockey Club, and she is a determined lady. Think barnacle crossed with Lossiemouth and you’ll get my drift. She was a fearless jockey in her day, and there wouldn’t be an obstacle in the country that would hinder her passage. And given the ‘headwinds’ that racing in general and the Jockey Club in particular are facing right now, this is her zeitgeist moment. Gentlemen, stand aside.
If you are having fomo because you’ve never been invited to the Cholmondeley Room and its terrace, ‘the principal function room of the House of Lords’, you can relax. It is, let us say, underwhelming.
But with the assistance of a clapped-out microphone, I welcomed my audience to the most exclusive daycare centre in the world. The House of Lords claret (2018) had clearly done its job. There were definite signs that they were all still awake.
My second gag didn’t go quite as well. I suggested that most of them wouldn’t be familiar with the locations where I had carried out my research for the evening: a newspaper archive to the east of London and a place on the internet called ChatGPT. Of the 90 members still alive at that point (one had taken a heavy fall on his way into dinner), it would be wrong to say that no one laughed; but there weren’t any demands from the second chamber to keep the noise down either.
One of the political issues confronting the baroness that I was encouraged to steer clear of was the moral dilemma of how the Jockey Club should spend the considerable profits from the Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National meetings, its two big cash cows. Should those funds fall horizontally through their smaller regional tracks, ‘grass roots’ point-to-points and National Hunt breeders’ incentives? Or should they move horizontally into flat racing prize money at Epsom and Newmarket, which they also own?
Breeders producing National Hunt stock could do with all the help they can get. But the international prestige of the top flat races cannot be maintained if their prize money, which is already trailing countries such as France, falls behind any further.
There is also the necessity of attracting international stars to appear in races which are part of the World Pool. Organised by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the World Pool attracts punters from Asia and beyond, and the racecourses’ take from that is the only light that racing has at the end of the tunnel right now.
So, having failed to study the dinner guest list, I stayed on what I thought was safer ground. ‘You’re going to have to close a racecourse or two,’ I advised them. I wasn’t exactly expecting them to howl with laughter at that, but neither had I expected a heavy frost to freeze over my water glass either. But I resolutely ploughed on.
‘Haydock Park must go… trainers don’t like running their best horses there any more,’ I suggested. Which is true. Maybe it’s the soil substructure, or maybe it’s because it’s close to Manchester and it never stops raining. Who knows?
But what I did know was that I was rapidly losing my audience, so I moved on to one of their great former senior stewards, Lord Howard de Walden, who had a quick sense of humour.
When he was senior steward sometime in the 1980s, there was a period when the Jockey Club and the press were getting on famously badly. So Lord Howard put on a dinner at the club’s rooms to shoot the breeze with the pesky pressmen and stick a bit of claret down their necks.
Unfortunately the late Jim Stanford of the Daily Mail did himself rather too well, as was his wont. He promptly threw up during the Q&A. But without missing a beat, Lord Howard just said: ‘Thank you for bringing that up, Mr Stanford.’
‘Listening to that was like cantering across a ridge and furrow field,’ I was advised when I sat down. And unwisely I delayed my getaway to neck a well-deserved glass of brandy.
‘How do you do?’ asked a man who had made a beeline for my table and was towering above me. ‘I’m the chairman of Haydock racecourse…’
Of course, it’s jolly good fun to take the mickey out of the Jockey Club, but there are some very smart operators among the membership. More’s the shame that they don’t own a few more racecourses.
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