Paul Cooksey wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 5:50 pm
JustinHorton wrote: ↑Fri Jul 30, 2021 4:06 pm
For what it's worth I don't think Phil was a liar as such, just strangely disconnected from the idea that what he said had any requirement to be accurate or that anybody had a reasonable expectation of this being so. The fact that his written English tended to the impenetrable didn't help here either.
My feeling is he did not consider the question very important because he did not think there was any chance of wrong doing by the tournament organiser. He probably handled that matter worse than Mike Truran would. Almost certainly Mike would have handled the FIDE issue Roger raises better, given Phil wasn't a chess player.
I don't agree with the strategic direction Mike set, I did agree with Phil. Noone on this forum should be surprised I favour ECF reform. But that wasn't really the point I was making. Almost everyone involved in the ECF in 2021 was involved in 2015, so even if Mike is personally more competent than Phil, on the whole it is the same people with the same level of competence.
Most of the people involved in the ECF now voted for Phil a few times, even if I am the only one who publicly remembers doing it. You can certainly say that he was unsuccessful as CEO, albeit after a successful stint as junior director but calling him inept is unfair. You can definitely say he was unpopular by the time he left. But I think most of that because he was trying to change the ECF in ways the ECF did not want to be changed.
I'm talking about this not because I have any residual loyalty to Phil, but because I don't think either Mike or Tim is a wrong'un. I think characterising Phil as a wrong'un plays into the narrative there is always a bad guy to be unmasked.
I hate the way the campaign against Mike Truran is being organised, and called it out here and in Council. But that is the kind of campaign we get if we allow an ECF culture where whenever there is a contested election we assume there is a good guy and a bad guy and our job is to work out which is which.
That's all very sensible and, if my comments about the previous CEO were a distraction, then I apologise but I was attempting to draw a contrast between past and present CEO's with the "Be careful what you wish for" adage very much in mind.
I don't know Tim Wall personally and it may be that, in person, he is a charming individual. Among his claims to fame are an attempt to be elected as MP for North Tyneside when his Crowdfunder CV, presumably approved by himself, described him as " ...a lifelong socialist who first joined the Labour Party Young Socialists at age 18, and immediately got involved in the campaign to support the miners in their epic struggle with the Thatcher government in 1984-85. He has worked as a journalist for the last 18 years, in the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan, and is currently a website editor for Russia Today TV (RT) ..." and as a member of the Socialist Party of England and Wales, which most would describe as Trotskyist.
With that background, it's no wonder that he was assessed as politically sound enough to work for the state-owned RT. I've read elsewhere that Tim is sympathetic to the anti-Putin movement in Russia but, given that his personal freedoms there don't appear to have been curtailed and he apparently continues to work for RT, one is perhaps entitled to view that with polite scepticism. Everyone in the UK is entitled to their political opinions but I don't feel it unfair to suggest that Tim's beliefs do not characterise him as any friend of British institutions, of which - if one takes a broad view of what constitutes a British institution - the ECF is one.
Now, I'm not seriously suggesting that the ECF is anywhere on Vladimir Putin's hit-list. However, in as much as it represents opposition to its Russian counterpart, he has no reason to wish it well. I'm the first to concede that this is all rather circumstantial but the sight of a committed member of the hard left sowing discord among ECF members with comments which at best are tendentious and at worst gross distortions leaves me uneasy as to motives. I hope I'm wrong, and very likely I am, but I really don't want to risk finding out the hard way.