2022 and all that | TheArticle

Who won the World Cup? Argentina. But who were the really big winners? Qatar. And FIFA. No contest. FIFA’s president Gianni Infantino declared it “the best world cup ever”. No wonder. The

private entity that is the ringmaster of world football has trousered a cool £6 billion from the event.

Qatar, meanwhile, can claim the kudos for organising the most expensive sporting event in history (it spent an estimated £180bn on stadiums and infrastructure) without a hitch or even, it

seems, a single drunken brawl. (No booze. FA take note.)

That, and whatever backhanders Qatar may (or may not) have handed out to host the competition, will be deemed cheap at the price in Doha. You have to hand it to them.

The outcry over dead immigrant workers (paid around £275 a month) has faded. So has the anger over the little Gulf state’s treatment of its LGBT community. Thousands of column inches of

outrage later, the caravan moves on.

How much, if any, of the profits from the beautiful game will go to helping the families of those workers who perished building the string of colosseums in the desert where the gods of

football held the world in thrall?

A country barely the size of Yorkshire, Qatar has been playing giant monopoly to win friends and influence countries all over the world. Its worldwide holdings are reckoned to stand at

around £320bn. Not quite as juicy as China’s £1 trillion belt and roads initiative. But impressive nevertheless.

Next desert autocracy with a dodgy human rights record to host a future world cup: Saudi Arabia?

The outpouring of bile, bombast and affectation over Harry and Meghan’s Netflix series has been predictably fatuous and, in some instances, deeply unpleasant. Hunting the royals is a blood

sport and a pretty unedifying one at that. Nobody emerges with much credit.

In one corner you have dyed-in-the-wool monarchists choking over their cornflakes at the lèse-majesté. Bad-boy broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson, writing in the Sun, said he wanted to see Meghan

“running naked down every high street in Britain pelted with excrement”. Which bit of his dark heart does that come from?

In the other corner are those who sympathise with a young couple who had a pretty torrid time and have chosen – rashly — to speak out, perhaps burning their bridges. Who would want to speak

to them now without worrying they’d feature in the next Netflix series?

This is not the first time that a royal fairy tale doesn’t have a happy ending. The Firm has form. It does not tolerate outsiders who can’t or won’t conform. But “never complain and never

explain” is not a strategy for life. No great institution is immune to change. Even McDonald’s is rolling out vegan menus.

This inability to adapt is a critical weakness for an institution that sees itself as the keeper of the nation’s moral compass. Without Queen Elizabeth at the helm it will find it

increasingly so. But Harry and Meghan were never going to change that.

Meghan Markle represented an opportunity to broaden the monarchy’s cultural reach both at home and among the Commonwealth of colour. A good rule in life is that, by and large, you make

people responsible by giving them responsibility.

Harry and William will rue the day they allowed themselves to be estranged as brothers. That’s sad but far from uncommon. Envy, resentment, slights perceived or real, are the stuff of family

feuds. For Harry and Meghan the sugar high will fade.

But you have to ask: with all those wise heads around the late Queen, and now King Charles, why couldn’t this have been settled quietly? Was it that Meghan and Harry schemed to force a break

on their own terms — or, worse, for the Netflix shilling? Or did the Palace, once again, turn an opportunity into a threat that had to be neutered?

The Government is digging itself into a hole by refusing to sort out Britain’s industrial mess. After a whirlwind three years and more Prime Ministers than you can shake a picket’s poster

at, it has persuaded itself that hanging tough will turn public opinion against the unions, who will then back down.

It’s an odd strategy for a Government that has shut the country down three times during the pandemic, paid the wages of millions of workers and driven public debt to its highest level since

the 1960s.

Unions may be weaker than they were in the 1970s. But they’re not irrelevant. Urging the nation to clap for nurses one minute and demonising them the next for making Vladimir Putin happy by

bringing the NHS to its knees just won’t wash.

Governing, by definition, means taking responsibility. And that is the one thing that these Tories, not even the barely-competent Rishi Sunak, do not seem able to do. Prepare to be bored by

Sir Keir Starmer.

Elon Musk, though no longer the world’s richest man, is still worth about $164 billion. He once said he wanted to die on Mars. Before that he wants to save the world from itself. He’s on a

mission to save democracy, free speech, the ozone layer from fossil fuel pollution, move people in giant tubes from one continent to another and inhabit other planets.

Which is why he built Tesla, a rocket company and, more recently, bought Twitter. He’s allowed Donald Trump and Kanye West back on Twitter. He tried very hard to disprove the severity of the

Coronovirus after it hit production at his Tesla factories. That didn’t go so well.

Musk thinks he’s a genius and there’s some evidence to support that: he is a rocket scientist, after all. But he is also, as Vanity Fair pointed out in 2020, “bat-shit crazy”. The rumour

that he wanted to buy Manchester United turned out to be a joke. I do hope so.

My Mum was a refugee. She was caught trying to flee Russian-occupied Poland in WWII and sent to a Soviet Gulag for two years. It broke her. I’m pretty sure she’d want to nominate all

refugees from war, persecution and famine as her choice for People of 2022. I’d second that.

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