It's Sand, Man

Just when you thought it was safe to consign Qatar to the dustbin of history, the Middle Eastern country turns up all over the place. Here are two items from The Week, December 23, 2022:

The country, which spent over 300 billion dollars bribing and constructing its way into World Cup hosting, may be dismantling some of the bespoke stadia, but the greater building projects remain. And for what? The Qataris are determined to make their plot of land a tourist destination.

But what can attract tourists to visit Qatar? They are not going to see the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu there. The natural wonder of a Grand Canyon or a Victoria Falls is absent. The major natural element is sand. And staring at sand gets old very quickly.   

Advertising at the World Cup stadia claimed that Doha was the world’s best airport. So the visitor perhaps can feel enraptured by the tarmac and the boarding gates. But he should be warned—after that, it’s only sand.

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The great Calvin Trillin once came to my college to give a speech. Among his remarks (and I’m wildly paraphrasing here) he said that God must be a joker, having placed so much of the world’s petrochemical reserves under Middle Eastern sands instead of underneath the soil of a sane country like Denmark.  

Beer Bust

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Unless you’ve been unconscious for the past week or so, you know that the world’s most prominent sporting event—the FIFA World Cup, the soccer tournament of tournaments—has been going on in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. Holding the tournament in a land of (to put it kindly) soccer minnows of course makes as much sense as holding the premier auto racing series, Formula 1, this year in such noted automotive venues as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Abu Dhabi. 

Qatar, after winning its bid for the World Cup, set about hiring thousands of workers from impoverished countries such as Nepal to build a number of world-class stadiums. Many international companies signed on to be sponsors of the tournament, including Budweiser, who was assured that it would be the only beer allowed to be sold in those new stadiums. Imagine the chagrin in the suds headquarters when two days before the opening match, a decree came down that, Qatar being a Muslim country, it would not allow alcohol sales at the sporting venues. This turnabout was especially hard on the England supporters, who like to get tanked before kickoff. In The Guardian, Marina Hyde’s cynical take on this development was

let’s face it – serving only Budweiser was already a de facto beer ban.*

One didn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to expect that the “no-alcohol-please-we’re-muslim” proclamation was not all it seemed to be. 

The New York Times reported that 

[t]he main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol.**

The so-called ban, The Times reported,

didn’t affect the flow of free beer — or free champagne, Scotch, gin, whiskey, wine and other drinks — available to non-regular fans in the V.I.P., V.V.I.P. and hospitality areas. The rules, it seemed, did not apply to them.

At a $3,000-a-seat hospitality lounge at Al Bayt during the U.S.’s game with England, for instance, the bar menu included Taittinger Champagne, Chivas Regal 12-year-old whisky, Martell VSOP brandy and Jose Cuervo 1800 tequila.

 

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Upon reading The Times report, I couldn’t help but couple it with an exposé of a week earlier by The Guardian of the £29 million a Tory peer, Michelle Mone, secretly received from a firm supplying PPE through a government contract during the coronavirus epidemic. It was a firm that Mone actively lobbied the government for.

Documents seen by the Guardian indicate tens of millions of pounds of PPE Medpro’s profits were later transferred to a secret offshore trust of which Mone and her adult children were the beneficiaries.***

Alas, all was not smooth sailing for Mone after PPE Medpro secured the government financing. The poor dear had to cancel a planned wedding ceremony in the Palace of Westminster because of COVID restrictions. So she and her fiance, Douglas Alan Barrowman, switched the venue to Barrowman’s home on the Isle of Man, which had fewer COVID restrictions.

While the couple were making wedding arrangements from this base, Barrowman seems to have also been focusing on moving profits gained from PPE Medpro around various Isle of Man registered trusts, companies and accounts.****

But the bride had her Jimmy Choo shoes, the affair had an opera singer and five bands, and the couple could go on to enjoy their yacht, which, presumably, had smooth sailing.

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All of which proves Fitzgerald right and Hemingway wrong: the rich are different from you and me—they are hypocrites and cheats on a higher plane.

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* https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/18/beer-ban-beckham-and-a-vagina-stadium-the-world-cup-in-inglorious-technicolor-qatar

** https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/sports/soccer/qatar-world-cup-vip.html

*** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/revealed-tory-peer-michelle-mone-secretly-received-29m-from-vip-lane-ppe-firm

**** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/the-yacht-the-wedding-and-29m-michelle-mones-life-during-the-covid-crisis