The right punishment for the wrong reasons

The Sepp Blatter business is interesting, an example of a very modern, very ‘now’ process. That is, the comeuppance arriving for the wrong reason, but the politically correct reason.

The most obvious example in the last ten years or so was the shooting of Jean Charles De Menenez on the tube at Stockwell station. The Met Police were criminally incompetent, and there were many claims that they lied after the event to the press. What they got done for in the end, though – surreally – was an infraction of health and safety procedure.

And so we have Sepp Blatter, presiding over a corrupt cabal of delegates. Authoritarian and undemocratic – his recent re-election would have made Brezhnev blush. All of this stuff is known and even acknowledged – and yet what may finish him off, with any luck, is having suggested that players who have been the subject of racist abuse should shake hands and make up afterwards.

This is a fairly stupid thing to say, for sure, but it is also a transgression of the PC code which insists that nothing, absolutely nothing, trumps racism as a crime. His views were those of an out of touch elderly person from Switzerland and it’s right that he should have been forced to explain them better. But now he is being told to resign. Only now.