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88

Brian Barwick

When Caligula set the template for hilarious over-promotion, who would have thought that the day would dawn when the Football Association of England would make the creation of a horse as Consul of Rome seem a tediously conventional employment decision? In fact, giving his horse Incitatus that much-prized post was the sanest thing (not the highest of bars to clear, in truth) Caligula ever did. Its purpose was purely ironic. He intended to satirise the cravenness of his Senators by obliging them to celebrate the appointment as a masterstroke. As, to a Senator, what with being in terror of their lives, they did.

What Brian Barwick’s ironic intent in hiring Steve McClaren as England football coach might have been, on the other hand, I’ve no idea, because the only thing satirised there was the luminescent idiocy of Barwick himself and the FA of which he was chief executive. However, since the only other possible explanation is that he regarded Mr McClaren (see no. 25) as a gifted international coach, there is no option but to hail him as the world’s first, and doubtless last, kamikaze satirist.

Truth be told, this erstwhile TV sports executive looks nothing like an anarcho-comic genius. With the wide, bald dome and bristly little moustache, he more closely resembles Mr Grimsdale, the 1950s middle-management archetype in all those side-splitting Norman Wisdom flicks that still have them queuing round the block in downtown Tirana.

Mr Grimsdale can be excused for repeatedly hiring Norman, having noted the calamitous results of doing so in thirty-three previous films, on the grounds that he was a fictional character conforming to somebody else’s script. Mr Barwick wrote his own, yet no one but he was vaguely surprised that McClaren’s England stint concluded beneath a deluge of farce (brolly and all) of which a coalition of the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy, Jim Carrey and our own Chuckle Brothers could barely have dreamed. McClaren’s inadequacies were so evident to all but Mr Barwick that the first obituary to his England career was published the day after his appointment was announced. This was at least a day late.

Still more humiliating than the act of panic itself (in such a state was Barwick after his fiascoid failure to hire the Brazilian Luiz Felipe Scolari that he’d have given the job to a hat stand with the requisite coaching badge) was the way in which he chose to present it. Fans of Gordon Brown’s blanket denial in the summer of 2009 that he had intended to fire Alistair Darling as Chancellor should note that Brian Barwick had blazed that trail. He donned his straightest face to inform us that Mr McClaren had been his ‘first-choice candidate’ all along, within days of allowing himself to be filmed at Heathrow en route to talk to Scolari in Lisbon – the very act of amateur-hour incompetence which provoked the media frenzy that in turn frightened Scolari into telling Mr Barwick to stuff the job up his jacksie. And in the sense that Mr McClaren dwelt in a holiday cottage a few inches to the south of Mr Barwick’s upper colon at the time, this is precisely what he did.

Two years later, soon after McClaren had masterminded the epochal disaster at Wembley that saw England lose to Croatia and fail to qualify for Euro 2008, old Grimsdale followed him out of the FA. His involvement in football now rests with his place on the board of Hampton & Richmond Borough FC. So let us end this appreciation on an uplifting and life-enhancing note by congratulating Brian Barwick on finding his level at last. Long may he enjoy it.