Is anyone surprised?

History and experience tells me that it is a universal truth that hindsight and glib, sweeping generalisations are all too easy to hatch and that – as Boris Johnson and others temporarily in possession of apparent absolute power always find out, and/or as Harry S. Truman (US President 1945-1953) acknowledged with his desktop sign “The buck stops here” – it’s a damned sight harder to deal with great crises and matters of global or state significance in the here and now (and reality).

Those of us who habitually spout strident views on anything and everything to any temporary captive audience in the kitchen, or even at the dining room table, forget – or, to be fair, are sometimes man enough to acknowledge – that we’d be utterly hopeless if placed in absolute political power of anything.

The slight “push-back” on that admission, of course, is that we aren’t in charge of anything. Most of us never volunteered, or set off upon our working careers in the direction of public office at all, still less on a potential national or international stage.

Erstwhile Rust columnist Simon Campion-Brown regularly uses his contributions to this organ to spreads his conviction that anyone setting out to embark upon a career in politics should be automatically legally barred from ever doing so, simply because their interest in this area of life at all provides compelling evidence that they’d be useless at it.

What does strike me, however, in the wake of the enforced resignation yesterday of Football Association chairman Greg Clark after his car-crash appearance before the Commons Select Committee during which he deployed the words “coloured footballers” and a series of other inelegant terms or phrases, is that sporting bodies around the world generally seem to have a unique and pronounced ability to “cock things up” [to coin a phrase].

Whether one is looking at the would-be Top Six “breakaway” Premier League clubs who want to go their own way towards an European super-league; or the legion of  historic “young persons abuse” allegations in British Gymnastics; or World Rugby flaffing around in dealing with rugby union’s myriad of problems; or the English RFU running up the best part of £100 million in debt apparently having placed their collective heads in the sand and deluded themselves that the administrative gravy train was going to be never-ending and exponentially more lucrative decades into the future … all one can see at virtually every turn are groups of well-meaning but muddle-headed dunderheads trying to “put something back into the spots they love”.

And – all too often – precious little, hard-headed, financially prudent and/or dynamic business vision and nous.

I suppose it’s a case of “Some things never change” …