Trigger warning: This post includes both cricket and the British honours system. You have been warned. 😊
Many people have long thought of the cricket legend and professional Yorkshireman, Geoffrey Boycott, as Sir Geoffrey Boycott. He’s the sort of national treasure you’d expect to have “got his K” as being knighted is sometimes called, long ago. In fact, he’s only just, at the age of 78, been made a Knight of the Realm.
He was given the honour at the behest of the outgoing PM Theresa May, who is a big fan of his. The main reason his recognition has been so long delayed is due to his conviction, in 1998 in a French court, of domestic violence against his then partner. He claimed she was trying to blackmail him, and he has always protested his innocence. He was dropped as a commentator by the BBC and BskyB at the time. He has since come back as a commentator and was elected president of Yorkshire County Cricket Club in 2012.
I remember the case and I remember few people really believed him to be guilty, as his rehabilitation suggests. Nevertheless, his knighthood has been attacked. So, far, so what? We’d expect the usual suspects to do their usual thing. But wait, gentle reader, Sir Geoffrey is no mere paper knight. He is a Yorkshireman*, plain, blunt and contemptuous of soft southern equivocation. In fact, he’s gruff and blunt even by Yorkshire standards. He has not taken the attacks lying down, he has not adopted the usual duck, backtrack and apologise gambit of those attacked by the perennially offended. Indeed not, he has stood up for himself good and proper. There are some people in Islington who are clutching their pearls so tightly they may never let go of them.
Here’s the BBC Radio 4 interview, stick with it, you can actually feel the temperature go down when she mentions the conviction (03.00).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpEO3dD2Z-k
He makes a great point that even many Leave campaigners often don’t get around to. Law in France (and much of the EU) does not work as it does in “Anglo-Saxon” countries. You are not innocent until proven guilty and often (as in this case) the judge and prosecutor are the same person. So, three cheers for Sir Geoffrey, I hope he lives a long and cantankerous life, upsetting the pearl clutchers and delighting the rest of us.
*Yorkshire is a big, self-confident county, full of bluff, self-confident folk who are never wrong. A sort of English Texas.