What went wrong? everyone is asking — as if it isn’t obvious.

German coach, Franz Beckenbauer got part of it right when he said that the English Premier League, with its two cup competitions, leaves players exhausted by early summer and “burnt out” before major international competitions: the European Championship and the World Cup.

This is known as the Headless Chicken Syndrome, which was clearly visible in the team’s performances in South Africa. What to do about it?

1. Reduce the league by one third and disallow Premier clubs from playing in what used to be called the League Cup. That would help. What else?

2. Back in the early 1990s, Denmark failed to qualify for the European Nations Cup. The players were dismissed for the summer and they trailed off to the Med for a spot of the sybaritic life.

A few weeks later, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists, had to withdraw because of the wars in the Balkans. As next in line, Denmark was called up for the Finals. Back trooped the sun-soaked team, with no preparations whatever for the matches. They won the Championship.

England should adopt a similar relaxation routine before major tournaments.

3. I would also scrap the manager’s position and select an experienced team captain to pick the team and lead it on the pitch. That would meld the players better, and eliminate neurotic influences off the pitch and from the sidelines. It would also save the FA around £12 million a throw.

I’m no expert on football, but surely the team couldn’t do any worse under the Syntagma Regime?

The eurozone, and hence the European Union, is dying. Like a rotting mackerel in moonlight, it shines and stinks.

Labour’s continual bleating about “supporting the economy” for another year, now seems like a reedy squeak amid the worldwide scramble for retrenchment. California alone is said to have cut its spending this year by as much as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania and Hungary combined, despite Obama’s scratchy comments against European deficit cutting.

The major cause of this growing panic is the eurozone’s acute sovereign debt crisis and the approaching European banking collapse. There’s not enough money to solve these problems. They won’t go away. The fuse is lit.

The Bank for International Settlements has stated that sovereign debt problems are nearing boiling point in half the world economy.

Unless Germany immolates itself to save the Mediterranean countries, a bewildering realignment of nations is about to take place. America can probably sit this out, given its self-sufficiency and huge in-house resources. With the Fed printing money again at industrial levels, the US will get through this crisis, emerging at a lower level of wealth, but comparatively richer than the rest of the world. China is not immune either and may have severely overstretched its resources.

For Continental Europe, almost certainly it will mean the splitting of the eurozone and the end of the European Union as we have known it. Quite how it will fragment, and what bits will be left clinging to each other is hard to say. But Germany will have to regurgitate the south of Europe and retrench within itself by relaunching the deutschmark. Berlin is said to be printing the banknotes as I write this.

Other northern countries will follow suit, while negotiating their own relationship with the central-European giant.

The UK — luckily, and only just, under a Tory regime — will retreat into itself and sort out the inherent problems. With discipline it could emerge the stronger for it.

The resulting chaos looks set to mark the end of the post WW2 global settlement of downgrading nation states in a world run by international socialists. In the longer run, despite the chaos, this could be a positive development.

Annoyment of the Week

Fairness is a very annoying word. It’s being used obsessively in British political discourse now. Why?

Ask someone to define it and it usually boils down to: “something that works to my advantage”. That’s how Gordon Brown’s Labour Party defined it. So too the Liberal Democrats who now use it more often than Labour, even from within the Coalition.

For most people, a vague sense of Robin Hood hangs about “fairness”. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is seen to be fair, although taking anything that is not yours is clearly stealing.

In olden days, the Sheriff of Nottingham would store his loot … er … taxes in large caskets piled up in his personal treasury. There it would lie, perhaps for years, a huge chunk of spending power wrenched out of the local economy. No wonder they were mostly dirt poor.

Today, the wealthy are the main drivers of economic activity by investing their treasure in companies via the stock exchange or in special bank deposits. Cash is recycled into the most profitable channels, boosting jobs and growth.

Thus, if you take from the rich and give it to the poor, who do not invest because they have no surplus, you are depriving the economy of much of its driving force. In the end, that penalizes the poor most.

The simple concept of fairness used by politicians is merely a vote catcher. It has no validity in the real world. It’s usually linked with “equality” which doesn’t exist in reality either. A top-down equality, forced by the state, would look very like North Korea.

Real political fairness is when everyone has a genuine job, not a portfolio of welfare benefits.

David Cameron did very well at the G20 in Toronto. He has a natural way of being a Prime Minister that allows him to get along with all the others.

Where Gordon Brown had to chase Barack Obama into a hotel kitchen to beg for a bilateral on-camera, Cameron sat easily side by side with him, exchanging bottles of beer and jokes, while hitching a lift in the President’s personal helicopter. Obama even mentioned the “special relationship”, a subject which embarrasses most British people I know, because it’s not something that should be talked about.

I think Cameron is aware that “the business of America is business”. If you can do business, you’re special, if not, not.

Brown never came across as special. David Cameron does.

David Miliband says his worst mistake was not eating that banana before he hit the streets during the Party Conference.

Why would anyone walk out of their hotel carrying a banana anyway? Did he think it was cool? Was it his Mr Bean moment? Did he suppose it would humanize him?

He was offering himself for the leadership of the party at the time. Which party did he think it was? The Orangutan’s? Is he trying to tell us something?

On Newsnight last week he was in a hustings line-up for the Labour party leadership … again. What qualities could he bring to the job? Well, he said, “I wrote the Climate Change Bill”.

Most of the programme’s audience must have glazed over with thoughts of nine slop buckets in every kitchen, and a bill of £18 billion a year until 2050 to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint by 80%.

No other country is offering anything like as much. It will bankrupt future generations and lop only 1% from global carbon emissions. In other words, it will have no effect whatever. That Bill is now the law of the land.

Neither David Miliband, nor his even more geeky brother, Ed, can ever be trusted with the leadership of Britain. After Gordon Brown, we should investigate every leader they put up for the job with scrupulous cynicism.

The Mili brothers have already ruled themselves out.

Picture of the Week

The River Exe last Sunday morning. Click through twice on the pic for a larger image.

Photo by John Evans

John Evans

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Way back in the halcyon years of the 1980s, I plied a trade as a freelance copywriter in the City of London. My main clients were in telecommunications, especially BT, or British Telecom as it was known then.

BP, or British Petroleum as it was known then, was also a player in my multinational ecosystem. In those days, it was good to be British. Margaret Thatcher saw to that. Now apparently it’s the kiss of death.

Watching the unfortunate Tony Hayward’s crucifixion at the hands of a US Congressional Committee on Golgotha Capitol Hill yesterday, demonstrated how the mighty are only milliseconds away from disaster at all times.

His defeated expression throughout the proceedings was in distinct contrast to that of his predecessor, John Browne, the real progenitor of the string of disasters now haunting Hayward, BP, its shareholders and pensioners, on both sides of the Atlantic.

On Jeff Randall’s Sky programme on Thursday evening, author and scandal-sniffer Tom Bower, reminded us of the precursor to today’s woes. Browne had bought heavily into American oil and turned upper-middle ranking BP into one of the world’s great corporations. Small in height, his alleged Napoleon complex had rendered him invincible in his own mind. And indeed for a long time it seemed true.

Nowadays he’s known as Lord Browne and was brought down by a sex scandal a few years back. One wonders if that was engineered by figures unknown to move him on out of sight.

At the height of his relentless drive for power and status, Browne ruthlessly cut costs and trimmed safety margins as a result. A string of major incidents occurred, involving many deaths and injuries. BP was gaining an accident-prone reputation in the American mind.

When a small pipe, thousands of feet down in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, killing another 11 workers and polluting the fisheries and environments of countless people living along the US’s southern coastline, the dam of indignation and anger burst. It’s that spillover that now threatens BP more than the actual oil leak.

BP’s rise and fall is pure Greek tragedy. Even a minor godling looking down on the scene from Mount Olympus could have predicted the crash that was coming. In a small way I sensed it too after a final experience with the company in the 1980s.

I was asked to write a chunky booklet documenting and describing BP’s worldwide activities across all its divisions. These days they include, am/pm, Aral, Arco, Castrol, and Wild Bean Cafe, whatever that is. Back then it was chemicals and an array of petroleum products and outlets.

Entering BP’s massive headquarters in the City, I was met by a young woman from Tech Pubs who was to oversee the project. I was delighted to hear that the designer was someone I had worked with many times before and was a leader in his field.

The dampener came when Miss Tech Pubs warned me that the text would be scrutinized minutely by the senior managers of all the divisions, most of whom were engineers. I was experienced enough to expect a solid technical input.

Engineers worldwide have a peculiar way of expressing themselves. Most sentences begin with “Then …”, and the rest tends to be gobbledigook. If you’ve ever tried to master a manual accompanying a technical product, such as a top of the range digital camera, you’ll know what I mean.

Needless to say, everything I wrote was lifted out and replaced with chunks of already existent text written in impenetrable jargon. The broader purpose of the document, that of presenting BP as an inspiring benefactor of the Earth, was totally buried by formulaic spam.

When the final booklet appeared in print form, I was amused to note that the designer had used a small typeface and set the text blocks in a light grey on a white background. They were hardly discernible, except as a design element.

He had also agreed to a personal request to have my name discreetly removed from the cover. Tony Hayward eat your heart out.

For me, the writing was on the wall for BP back then. At its centre was a machine that preferred stale platitudes to vibrant messages, technical ramblings to vivid expressions of purpose. It was a vacuum that is visibly imploding today.

How can this massive international company retrieve itself from a seemingly impossible situation without being bitten to bits or swallowed whole by fat predators?

It should first do penance by admitting the early mistakes made in the John Browne era and the apparent inability to put them right over the last three years. Tony Hayward should go gracefully for the good of the company. An engineer with no public relations or presentational skills is of no use to BP now if it is to survive. So too should the silent Chairman.

I would recommend a massive programme aimed at finding new types of affordable, non-combustible energy, on top of its current commitments in the field.

This should be launched with an immense public relations effort around the globe, but especially in America. I’m assuming, of course, that the current leak and its effects will be cleaned up sometime during 2010, and certainly in time for next year’s fish stocks and holiday season.

Aggressive Big Oil should give way — if only partially and presentationally — to Saving the Planet.

John Evans

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I’ve decided to give up writing about politics on this site. The reason is that, with a new business to run, there simply isn’t time.

Writing about politics is an all-consuming activity. It glues you to 24-hour news almost 24/7. It entices you to read all the serious newspapers and political magazines every day of the year. Add to that, time spent trawling the internet, Googling for clarifications and chasing up leads, plus the background research and fact-checking.

Instead, Syntagma will revert to type and concentrate on a melange of finance, philosophy and technology as in days of yore.

I know I shall be tempted to dip inky fingers into the increasingly murky waters as the British General Election gets near, but be assured Reader, my resolve will hold.

Except, of course, to raise a hearty cheer, and glass, when David Cameron walks into 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister.

The rest is silence …

John Evans

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Imagine you are a hardened criminal who has just stolen the Crown Jewels.

Would you (a) melt down the gold and sell off the gems to handpicked buyers associated with the underworld? Or (b) declare them to Companies House as assets on your balance sheet?

The ludicrous declaration by Sir Peter Viggers of the creation of a floating island for his ducks as an aid to his Parliamentary duties, places him firmly in the Laurel and Hardy camp. He made £1600 from the act, but I’m sure he didn’t need it.

There’s a lot of that around. MPs are illustrating just how inept they would be if ever they decided to walk on the wild side of the law. The real question is, does that make them unfit for public office, or, in an endearing sort of way, does it reveal their fundamental honesty?

The Tory claims are generally more colourful than Labour’s. Douglas Hogg’s moat is a good example. You can imagine him exclaiming, “Doesn’t everyone claim for their moat on expenses?”

We’re into darker territory with the many MPs who avoided Capital Gains Tax on a house sale by “flipping” the designation of the property to that of their main residence. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less, did this four times in four years. He was in effect indulging in property speculation at public expense. Surely he can’t survive?

Again, to put this in perspective, many buy-to-let landlords do something similar when offloading one of their properties. The technique is to rent out your own house and move into the flat or house you want to sell. Once you’ve been there for six months it becomes your main residence for tax purposes and can be sold without paying CGT. I’m told it’s a common practice in the trade.

Surely the Revenue has cracked that one by now, you may ask? Apparently not. The law lays down the six-month rule, and it’s not illegal to move from house to house. Shady, but within the rules.

The Secretary for Communities and Local Government, that walking rictus Hazel Blears, managed this, we are told, three times in one year without, apparently, actually moving in. A bit excessive? It’s still said to be “within the law”. And the law is made by Parliament.

Clearly, Members of Parliament have to have higher standards than your average Dell Boy down the Mile End Road. There can be no excuse for endearing incompetence for the important folk who make the rules the rest of us have to abide by on pain of increasingly draconian penalties. Laurel and Hardy are for Hollywood not Westminster.

Someone has to draw the line somewhere and it can’t be Gordon Brown. He’s too implicated in the wreckage of everything he’s touched over the past 12 years.

What’s much worse than the occasional Stan and Ollie is a calculating manipulator who deliberately turns every decision and action to his own, and his cronies’, advantage.

Brown is severely damaged goods and must relinquish the reins of power before the fumigation of government begins.

Duckgate is a passing amusement. Smile, and move on. There are much more threatening characters to remove from public life.

Let’s not be diverted. Bring on that General Election now!

John Evans

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We constantly hear about interest rates falling to zero as a means of heading off the imminent prospect of deflation. We are also warned that this is “the last shot in the locker” for monetary policy.

But is it? Can rates go negative, for example, or are there other strategems to fall back on? It’s surprising how inventive central bankers and policymakers can be when their backs are to the wall.

“Quantitative easing”, which sounds more like a medical treatment than an economic transaction, is the hot topic of the moment. It involves central banks printing money and getting it into people’s pockets by any means available.

The famous helicopter drop of banknotes — half-jokingly proposed in the 1980s — is much talked about in these parlous times. In its original form it involved the government stuffing money into empty beer bottles, which are buried underground. Workers are then employed to dig them up.

Perhaps a more seasonal variation might be to hire thousands of Father Christmases to stuff cash into people’s stockings on Christmas Eve. What a Yuletide that would be.

My favourite would be a civil servant knocking on my door and handing me a large bag of gold sovereigns. Well, you never know with Gordon Brown. He loves giving away other people’s money.

No doubt when it comes, as it will, it’ll be much more boring than that — the buying up of corporate bonds or government debt, for example.

There’s just no romance in the political soul, is there?

Apropos of this, Roger Bootle has an excellent primer for dummies on the implications of low interest rates in today’s UK Telegraph. Sample:

There is a clear incentive for policymakers to reach zero interest rates as quickly as possible. If there is even a small possibility that the economy is heading for deflation, it is better to do all you can to prevent it before it begins.

Read: Heading for zero

John Evans