The Guardian: Henson’s honesty shames Campbell and Woodward

There has been no more chilling incident in the entire world of sport this year than the one that occurred in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel, Christchurch, last June, when Alastair Campbell approached Gavin Henson and thrust at him a piece of paper headed “Gavin Henson Quotes”.

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Henson, the golden boy of Wales’s Six Nations-winning squad, had just been left out of the Lions team selected by Sir Clive Woodward to face the All Blacks in the first match of the three-Test series. If he, like most of Wales, was puzzled and unhappy over that decision, Campbell’s intervention left him furious.

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In his new book, serialised in the Mail on Sunday, Henson records his bemusement in terms that make you weep for what it says about the loss of innocence and honesty in sport… As soon as the statement was issued to the press, however, anyone enjoying even the slightest acquaintance with the player recognised that the words were not his. And so, even before they had played a Test, the integrity of Woodward’s Lions was being destroyed from within, by the party’s own management.

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[W]e should give thanks to Henson for his willingness to expose the unpleasant truth behind some of the salient events of the tour, including a full description of the way Campbell conspired to have the player and the coach photographed together by a hidden cameraman, in order to give the public the clear impression of a warmth that did not exist.

Power, as they say, is an aphrodisiac. Missing the powdered rhino’s horn of being an unelected, unaccountable head-kicker for a morally bankrupt government, Campbell thought pushing rugby players around would be just the ticket for putting the zing back into his shrivelled cock of a career.

It all comes back to my new pet theory. I’m increasingly fascinated by the idea that we live in a reality fashioned by those who we allow to lead us. Just like being inside the book, The Man In The High Castle. (It’s my horse and, be it alive or dead, I’ll flog it.)

It could be argued I suppose, that I am fashioning my own reality here at Chicken Yoghurt and as guilty as the rest. I’d like to think CY is more of a filter, trying to make sense of our reality (realities?) and it’s underlying moral code which are both, for want of a better phrase, fucked up, man.

The (rather trivial) truth surrounding a rugby player not being selected was not for the likes of a media hated by Campbell and what he saw as bovine fans who would lap up any old excrement and call it gravy, so he created his own truth with fake quotes and staged photographs. His fiction in this instance had a short shelf life. But then his lies have always had a tendency to float away on the breeze once they’d served their purpose. Dog turds are biodegradable.

It’s the sinister way of things these days. If Gordon Brown sits at a typewriter and writes “ONE MILLION CHILDREN LIFTED OUT OF POVERTY”, it becomes a literal truth. Can you prove to me it isn’t so? We’d have to count every kid to be sure. If Charles Clarke scribbles “THESE MEN ARE TERRORISTS” on a scrap of paper, then they are terrorists, and one reality winks out of existence to be replace with another. Let’s hope he never gets around to idly doodling, “MY OILED AND GLISTENING, NAKED TORSO IS THE ONLY THING EVERYBODY WILL SEE WHEN THEY CLOSE THEIR EYES AT NIGHT”.

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that we’re witnessing an incursion into our plain of existence by pan-dimensional beings of unprecedented power, able to fashion reality by sheer will alone. Blair, Campbell, et al are merely the physical manifestations in this dimension of creatures constructed of a terrible geometry. Somebody phone David Icke.

(What is their terrible, mind-splintering goal, beyond human comprehension? It can’t just be to make a few blood-streaked quid for themselves and assorted lobbyists, and then retire, surely? Please tell me there’s more to it than that. I’m starting to feel like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard when he finds that the villain’s elaborate plot has a less than glorious goal: “So this is what it’s about, Hans? A fucking robbery?”)

Or is it that, as common sense and Occam’s Razor would dictate, the British public are brutish, stupid and happy to believe anything they’re told as long as there as there are rutting celebrities in their newspapers, football and soap operas on their televisions, and plentiful, cheap lager and fruit-based knicker-droppers at their off licences?

I’m not sure which reality is worst.