“When I open a hard-boiled egg and I take the first mouthful and I think, what’s that, and then the second mouthful – there’s half an embryo in it. Well, excuse me but I find that a little bit revolting.” And quite right too. Finally someone has had the guts to say it. Embryo egg bites, imposed on everyday country people by the postcode weekenders of the London wokelite. Wake up sheeple. And when you’ve finally woken up, please buy my bespoke Beefy-blockchain NFTs.
Ian Botham’s appearance on the youth TV show Open To Question in 1986 has already passed into internet legend, long before it began to feel like a brilliantly prescient forerunner of the current bloom of speak-your-brains free-thinker YouTube channels telling you the truths they don’t want you to hear.
It is also just a wonderful piece of TV, during which Imperial Phase Botham, all tumbling golden toasted ringlets, power moustache, coiled with insolent alpha power on his elevated easy chair, is grilled to within an inch of his life by an incredibly eloquent and well-briefed group of Scottish teenagers.
To be fair Botham does pretty well in the circumstances, fighting his corner on topics as diverse as leaving the changing of nappies to his wife (“You’re missing the context, love”), to smoking dope (“Yeah, I dabbled a few times”) to racism (“If a man’s black, blue, green or got pink spots and I like the guy I couldn’t give a stuff” – reassuring news for guys he likes).
The embryo-egg gambit is Botham’s response to a question about his description of Pakistan as “a place to send your mother-in-law”, posed by a young woman called Mazer Rahman, who explains, patiently, that it was difficult to hear those comments from such an icon of British sport, and who then asks quite reasonably how Botham squares that with things like his public opposition to apartheid, basically opening up a door for Botham to be a great guy and say, OK, fine, love, I get it, I understand your point of view, perhaps we can all use this to move on and connect and be nice.
But Botham doesn’t do any of that. Instead he deploys the embryo egg defence, before going on at great length and with much eye-rolling to explain his own point of view, which is – and this is key – that he’s just always right, even when all the facts and evidence suggest he’s not right – that’s when he’s most right, possibly more right than anyone has ever been. How many Test wickets have you got?
Which is all fine and evidence, in the most entertaining sense, of the enduring question: why would anyone care what Ian Botham says? How could it matter? This is simply Beefy, the pirate king, a maverick who doesn’t live by “the rules”, who says that’s what I think of your selection policy, that’s what I think of your independent, highly detailed report into racism in cricket. It is, despite the best efforts of the bridleway-blocking BBC bubble, still a free country.
All of this probably explains why Botham’s surprisingly angry verdict on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s recent bombshell report passed without a great deal of comment this week. Botham, who tells it like it is, was speaking on the Up Front podcast to Simon Jordan, who, in similar vein, tells it like it pertains indubitably to exist in a state of current beingness.
The key takeaway was that Botham is absolutely furious about the carefully sourced, highly detailed independent report, which found “deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism, sexism and class-based discrimination”, which confirmed emphatically the findings of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s first such report as long ago as 1997, which reflected exactly the separate testimony of people at all levels over the last three years of heightened attention. But which is, in Botham’s opinion, “nonsense” plus “a complete and utter waste of money” that has “definitely got it wrong”; a state of unshakable certainty he reached by reading “bits of it” before “throwing it on the floor”.
And yes maybe it doesn’t matter, because this is just Beefy. Because these are simply his politics, as reflected in his deeply moreish columns in the Daily Telegraph, where he is also a director, which are always about the betrayal of simple country folk by faceless and grasping urbanites (supercut headline: Why Country people are sick of the woke BBC which will Ultimately Murder Your Gerbil On A Bridleway Using a Remote Electric Fence Controlled By the Woke BBC Which Country People Are Sick Of). Basically he’s an energy guy, a do-stuff guy. His charity walks remain a greater single net positive (while plastering over the neglect of his hero Margaret Thatcher) than any of us will ever muster up on our own. Old man yells at report. Do we have to care?
Actually we do. Firstly because Botham isn’t just Beefy, he’s the chairman of Durham County Cricket Club. He is one of 18 people to be a county cricket chair, with administrative and pastoral duty of care to tend to the summer sport.
Imagine if the chairman of Surrey or Nottinghamshire had dismissed a report into racism in their own industry as nonsense, and the authors as biased charlatans? Imagine how a 14-year-old at Botham’s own county, edging a little anxiously through the academy, is going to feel hearing the great Beefy himself describing any misgivings he or she may have as nonsense to be ridiculed.
Here we have the chairman of a county with a vote on how public money is distributed, not just mocking a profoundly serious societal issue, but belittling the experiences of victims of racism on the basis that he, Lord Botham, spoke to Nelson Mandela a few times.
And this does matter. You should not get to wield that power without some degree of respect, care or at least the decency to read the actual evidence. In a more regulated, less celebrity-obsessed sporting culture Botham would have made his own position untenable. Perhaps it already is.
It also matters because Botham is in the House of Lords, in effect one of the nation’s lawmakers (in fairness he has only spoken 70 words in the House since his introductory speech).
With this in mind perhaps the best that can be said is that Botham is doing us a favour; not only performatively embodying the deep structural issues within the report, acting out publicly the resistance to change; but showing just as clearly the absurdity of a system where being really, really good at sport is enough to qualify for a role in the second house of government.
