8 September

It’s a difficult time to be an administrator. Both politicians, and senior managers in organisations, are running roughshod over due process, due processes set up often over generations. Sports stars do the same with their officials. Collective wisdom is in those traditions, being undermined by constant attack of those who administer them. Look at Trump, who targets the whistleblowers of his incompetence relentlessly. At the same time the general public are often on the same side as these bullies, because for decades they’ve been told stories about ‘red tape’, and ‘bureaucracy’, and in the case of sport, of continuous assault on officials (Serena Williams today, for example). That’s why the bullies get away with it. That red tape is the only thing that has ever protected traditions, continuity in what humans do.