It was the great Tom Lehrer who said, when Henry Kissinger was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, that “satire was dead”. This era’s professional wags were similarly minded to put down their pens after US President Donald Trump was given the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize ahead of this year’s World Cup.
The answer, it transpires, is to insert some singularly British idiocy into the mix. Fourteen long years ago, in simpler days on the eve of the London Olympics, we were introduced to Ian Fletcher, the Games’ “head of deliverance,” in Twenty Twelve.
Alongside Jessica Hynes’s smiling assassin – aka PR company marketing guru Siobhan Sharpe – he was paid to choose between Gok Wan or Peter Andre as torchbearers, and decide whether the official countdown clock should go backwards or forwards – all the big decisions.
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I’m not sure what it says about senior management personnel the world over that the same Ian Fletcher is entirely believable in his new posting, as a deliberately unnamed football organisation’s “director of integrity” in Twenty Twenty Six. Despite the deeper pockets and Pepsification of the US World Cup, the hapless Brit fits right in.
However, Twenty Twenty Six’s most enjoyable aspects remain those nonsenses of bureaucracy that have travelled effortlessly from their previous London offices: the fact that the higher up the ladder you go, the less work you have to do; that the number of words spoken in a meeting is in inverse proportion to the number of decisions made; that self-belief needn’t require skill or knowledge; and, of course, the politics of a PA delivering a mid-meeting coffee.
What will Ian Fletcher do next? He could trade in his Brompton for a Vespa and head off to Italy to manage the national men’s football team, who have somehow failed to qualify for their third World Cup in a row after victory in 2006. After all, as he says, “Problems are just solutions waiting to happen.” So that’s all good.
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