This dotty view did not merit a red card

It's impossible not to feel just a teeny bit sorry for Glenn Hoddle. He said something very silly, and now he's paid the price.

If there's one man in Britain who must know just how he feels it's surely Gerald Ratner, who also said something very silly - joking in a public speech that the goods sold in his jewellery stores were "crap" - and saw his company's (and his own) fortunes plummet.

Both men must have suffered a terrible sinking feeling in their stomachs when they picked up their newspapers the next day and realised that they'd dropped a calamitous clanger.

But sympathy for Hoddle has to be tempered by two things. One is that he comes out of it with more money than most of us will earn in a whole working lifetime. It's hard to shed too many tears even for the plight of his poor daughter, who made a poignant last-minute appeal on the family's behalf for him not to be sacked. She won't starve.

The other is that his reaction was typical of that of many people nowadays who find themselves caught out. He blamed it on media incompetence and malice.

Yet I doubt if the man from The Times whose interview with Hoddle unearthed the England coach's controversial views on the disabled set out to "get him".

It would have to be a very inept journalist indeed who, finding that sort of quote cropping up in the middle of an interview, would have crossed it out in his notebook, coughed impatiently, and said: "But let's get back to the point, Glenn. Just what do you think of England's chances?"

If the coach was coming up with dotty views about disabled people and previous lives, it was surely of public interest.

But was it worthy of the public hysteria which followed - a manifestation of the worrying new British trend to take things much too seriously? If Glenn Hoddle was rubbish as a coach - and there are some who say he was - then that was good enough reason to call for him to be removed from the job. But being found to hold offbeat views on disability is surely not a sacking offence - however offensive those views might be to many people, especially those with disabilities.

He deserved to be denounced as an insensitive oaf. He deserved to have his opinions mocked and derided. He deserved to be told by the Football Association to restrict his comments in future to the subject of football and stay away from "them things".

But he didn't deserve the universal roar of "FOUL" and the giant red card which was waved at him by virtually the entire nation - led by those newspapers which had been waiting for the chance to get him sent off since his failure to inspire England to World Cup success, and including Prime Minister Blair who surely must have more important matters to occupy his mind.

Whatever happened to the British tradition of tolerating an individual's opinions, however eccentric or unpalatable they might be? And whatever happened to the British sense of humour which at one time would have sought to make a joke, rather than a martyr, of Glenn Hoddle for his fruitcake views?

We're becoming a sad lot under the cosh of political correctness, aren't we?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.