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RTÉ News
21-06-2025
- Sport
- RTÉ News
Quotable bosses adding to the gaiety of summer
Have we entered the golden age of the gaffer in inter-county football? The manager in its modern guise has been with us for just over a half century now. Back in the Pathé News era when plummy-voiced old Etonian commentators chortled at the physical roughness of the Gael, there were noted figureheads whose duties broadly approximated to that of a modern manager. Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan in Kerry, John 'Tull' Dunne in Galway, Fr Tommy Maher with the Kilkenny hurlers. However, the cult of the manager only arrived in earnest in the mid-70s, when Jimmy Gray decided there was too much anarchy on the Dublin sideline and installed the already legendary Heffo as chief capo. Kerry, always watchful regarding revolutionary developments elsewhere, stuck Micko in an equivalent role for the following year and we were away. They've been with us ever since. A brooding presence, often portrayed as a destructive one. In the intervening decades, the inter-county manager has been blamed for ruining the club game, their players' training-life balance and the entire sport itself. But, despite it all, they remain a vital presence. For the past six months, the League of Ireland's current stable of managers have been hogging the headlines, cognisant of their responsibility to serve as hype-men for the product. One manager, in particular. Since arriving into the LOI's managerial paddock in a blaze of publicity three years ago, Damien Duff has excelled in the rather vague discipline of 'mind-games', otherwise known as 'saying stuff'. As a former player of Jose Mourinho's during Chelsea's glory years of the mid-2000s, he has learned from one of the greats. But who is the Duffer or Jose of the inter-county managerial game right now? A few names are jockeying for the accolade. Clearly, longstanding Donegal messiah and disruptor Jim McGuinness is a compelling candidate. The Glenties grandmaster re-wired the entire sport during his first stint, such that they eventually had to form a committee of illustrious elders to rewrite the rules altogether. In his first year back in 2024, he set about building a wall, if not around aul' Donegal, then at least around their training centre in Convoy, to prevent against Marcelo Bielsa-style spies surveilling their match preparation. In 2025, he seems instead to be building an 'us against the world' mentality up there, if his pre-prepared monologue outside their dressing room last Sunday is any guide. Clearly, this intervention followed in the wake of some heavy research, given Jim's knowledge of the precise travelling distance between Hyde Park and Mayo's training ground. "That would only happen because it's us," McGuinness argued, having apparently not plotted the exact distance from Valentia to Tullamore. McGuinness' outburst was subsequently re-interpreted as an attempt to strong-arm the CCCC into placating him with a seven-day - rather than a six-day - turnaround this weekend. Sure enough, Donegal-Louth throws in at 4pm on Sunday. In the game at large, much like Jose in his early years, McGuinness is regarded as a mystical coaching superbrain and a managerial svengali. This was especially apparent when Donegal were scoring no goals during the league. In the case of the average hired hand on the managerial merry-go-round, a dearth of goals would be taken as straightforward evidence of his team's attacking limitations. Not so in Jim's case, where the automatic assumption was that he must be hiding something. Something so clever that he didn't want to roll it out until the optimal moment late in the season, when the competition would have no time to react. Or else he had run the numbers and calculated that pursuing goals was a waste of effort in the new scoring dispensation, and that he was simply quicker to realise as much than the Kerry lads, who scored them by the truckload during the league. But Jim faces stiff competition for the accolade from within his own province. While Joe Public and much of the sporting commentariat are calling for a statue to be erected to Jim Gavin, Kieran McGeeney has carved out a role as the FRC's dissident-in-chief. During the league, Geezer regularly complained that no one was allowed utter a word of criticism about the new rules, something he has nonetheless been doing in almost every interview since. As a stout defender of the modern game, circa 2024, McGeeney's issue seems to be less with the rules themselves than the 'in-my-day' pundits and former players whose incessant carping provided much of the impetus behind their introduction. With Pat Spillane now positioning himself as cheerleader-in-chief of the new Gaelic football, McGeeney inevitably finds himself drawn in the opposite direction. Having seemingly reconciled himself to the new rules, McGeeney is now peeved that they're changing again. "Listen, honestly, they just seem to be able to do what they want," McGeeney said, on hearing word that the 50m penalty for interfering with a midfield mark was about to go, just before the knockout phase. "Some teams tell them to do something, I'd love that direct line. Whoever has that direct line into Jim (Gavin) and Eamonn (Fitzmaurice), I would love that." We obviously have no clue to whom Geezer is referring... other than to note that a certain inter-county manager, let's call him J'OC, branded the 50m penalty for the midfield mark "ridiculous" and insisted it would have to go after Kerr... his team... ironically got the benefit of it in a group stage game. McGeeney followed that up with the pithiest explainer of the mechanics of the GAA tackle zone that we have read for some time. "Everything is a foul. Everything isn't a foul. You just swing with the punches and do what you can." While it isn't worded that way in the legislation, Geezer's summation certainly rings true in practice. But McGeeney and McGuinness aren't alone among the contenders. In the west, Pádraic Joyce has emerged as the king of the blunt speakers. It became an article of faith for managers during the Alex Ferguson era that 'thou shalt not criticise your players in public.' The Galway boss seems remarkably indifferent to that edict as he breezily offers stinging assessments of his players' performances in post-match scrums. After the win over Armagh, Joyce said that Shane Walsh had been subject to much unfair criticism in Galway. Some Galway supporters did offer up the rejoinder that perhaps Walsh's staunchest critic was none other than the Galway manager - Pádraic Joyce himself. Sure enough, in a subsequent round of interviewers, Joyce responded to questions about Walsh's Man of the Match display by sighing that it had been "a long time coming". And we're only three months removed from his famous "they missed about 2-10 between them" press conference after the league loss to Dublin. If Galway's 2025 season was Ireland at Italia 90 - and they came pretty close to drawing all three group games - then Joyce is simultaneously its Jack Charlton and its Eamon Dunphy. In the process, Joyce seems to have created a scenario where his players seem cheerfully immune to what their manager says in public, though his legendary status in the county has given him some leeway. Between the 'mind-games', the megaphone diplomacy, the clap-backs at the pundit class, and the brief spot of caustic post-match analysis, the managerial paddock are spoiling us this summer. The media aren't complaining.
Evening Standard
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Evening Standard
How to make a white lady, David Cameron's favourite cocktail, according to Sarah Vine
There is much ado regarding Sarah Vine's memoir, How Not to Be a Political Wife. It is a book about rivalry and resentment, entitlement and marriage. Everyone in Westminster is talking about it – how it delves into the testy, Etonian politics of the David Cameron premiership, from ascent to decline. How it is as much about friendships, parties, trips to Ibiza and the cocktails made.
Spectator
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
Harold Wilson was awful and brilliant
Does anyone still talk about Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who died 30 years ago today? Though the Labour party often seems keen to forget a leader who won – almost uniquely – four out of five elections, he was, perhaps more than anyone, the prime minister who ushered in the modern age. When he stood in the general election of 1964, he was widely billed as a moderniser. Up against Tory Alec Douglas-Holme – the grouse-shooting Old Etonian Earl, who described the old age pension as 'donations' to the elderly and had, as chancellor, used matchsticks to understand economics – Wilson seemed like the dawning of a new age. Words like 'thrusting,' 'dynamic,' 'purposeful' and 'scientific' were thrown about him, and he promised a 'New Britain' 'forged in the white heat' of a technological revolution.
New Statesman
21-05-2025
- Sport
- New Statesman
Letter from Wigan
Photo by George Hutton In early March, Darren Orme was reported missing from his home on the Beech Hill estate in Wigan. He was well known locally as a 'superfan' of Wigan Athletic football club, and his disappearance galvanised the local community in his support. As the days passed and he had not been found, flowers, scarves and football shirts were left in his honour outside the Brick Community Stadium, as if his loss was already being mourned. The stadium, renamed in May 2024 to reflect a partnership with a local anti-poverty charity, is the home ground of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors, the all-conquering rugby league club coached by Matt Peet. Both clubs are owned by Mike Danson, the CEO of GlobalData and owner of the New Statesman, who was born and grew up in Wigan. Under his ownership, the two clubs, once rivals, are working in collaboration as the Wigan Sporting Group and will share an open-plan office at the Robin Park Arena, adjacent to the Brick stadium. Darren's body was eventually found in a river near the stadium. His funeral was held on 24 April and many hundreds of local people were in attendance alongside players and officials from the football and rugby clubs. 'We'd never seen anything like it before,' Kris Radlinski, who played 332 games for Wigan Warriors from 1993 to 2006 and is now the CEO of the club, told me. 'There was silence, there was respect. The funeral procession did a lap of the stadium on the way to the church. At the end of the lap, the procession stopped, and the family got out to thank all the footballers and rugby players who were there. It was a powerful moment, the closest together the two clubs have felt in 30 years.' Professor Chris Brookes (universally known as 'Doc'), chairman of Wigan Warriors, agreed the symbolism was striking. 'The two clubs now need to move forward in a connected way, so we are working actively to combine resources and efforts, maximising our contribution to the people of Wigan and our loyal fanbases.' The sports group is an anchor institution in a town that has very few. Lisa Nandy, MP for Wigan since 2010, says 'sport is the glue holding the town together'. Danson, Radlinski and Peet are all from the town and understand that the Warriors are much more than a club: they represent a culture, a community, and create a sense of shared belonging. When George Orwell came to Wigan and Barnsley in the 1930s to write about the effects of mass unemployment, he found an England he could respect – even believe in. Deep underground with the miners in the Wigan coalfields, this contrarian old Etonian encountered a way of life that profoundly affected his politics. Orwell did not sentimentalise the northern working class in The Road to Wigan Pier, but admired their fortitude, togetherness and patriotism. He believed in a socialism that was not 'book-trained' but was compatible with the common decency of the 'submerged working class', among whom he briefly lived in Wigan. In a 1943 BBC broadcast, Orwell acknowledged that Wigan, though 'not worse than fifty other places', had 'always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas'. Lisa Nandy understands the sentiment. 'A whole industry has developed around understanding the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform,' she scornfully said. 'These people travel up from London almost like David Attenborough to observe these strange people in the wilds. They write absolute shite about us and then get back on their trains.' I told her I was in Wigan not as some kind of anthropologist but because I'd been asked to visit by Tom Gatti and Gordon Brown to write about the connection between sport, politics and the common good for this special issue of the magazine. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Nandy and I met on a bright morning at the Robin Park Arena where civil society groups were taking part in the Warriors' inaugural mental health awareness week. We spoke to a group of 12-year-old boys; they were among 40 children there, some of whom had been excluded from school. They were being encouraged to see how sport could offer discipline and definition to what one volunteer, a former police officer, called 'their often-chaotic lives'. 'I don't want to be in school,' one boy told me. 'I want to be here. I want to be active!' Wigan has advantages, not least in elite sports; the diaspora of former Warriors players includes Andy Farrell, head coach of Ireland rugby union team and now also of the British and Irish Lions squad that will tour Australia, and Sean Edwards, who is the defence coach for the French rugby union national team. The town's largest employer is Heinz, but it provides largely low-skilled work in food processing and packaging. Like other former coalfield communities (many of them rugby league towns), Wigan suffers from intergenerational inequality and economic stagnation. 'Not long ago mining and industrial production offered back-breaking work, but work with purpose: it won wars and underpinned our security,' Josh Simons, the former head of Labour Together and a local MP, told me. 'Since then, the internet revolution has offered little to northern towns. Our public realm has been left in ruins and our public services trashed.' Wigan has the highest male suicide rate in the country and some of the highest rates of domestic violence. It has the highest school suspension rate in England and as many as 23,000 children live in poverty (the theme of this guest-edited issue). Between 2010 and 2017 the local council had its budget cut by 43 per cent, the third worst affected local authority in England. There is inadequate infrastructure for new housing and lower than average life expectancy. Loneliness is a scourge, particularly among young men. The area has had several local 'asylum hotels', invariably located in poorer areas in England, which have been another source of tension, alongside rising house prices and rent costs. 'Rents have got higher and higher and so more and more houses have been turned into HMOs [houses of multiple occupancy] because that's the only thing that people can afford,' Nandy said. 'But on top of that, we've also had Serco buying up asylum accommodation, very concentrated in particular postcodes, even particular streets, because they go for the places that are cheapest. And obviously that's caused serious problems because you've then got several families in accommodation that's only meant for one. You've got problems with bin collections, with a very transient community in what used to be a very settled community. And so it's a double whammy because not only is the community changed beyond recognition, without people having any control over it, but it's also that the prices that your kids are now paying [for housing] have become ever higher.' (Serco say they do not buy property but lease from private landlords.) In a previous conversation, Nandy mentioned to me that the north of England was so tense it could 'go up in flames'. What did she mean exactly? 'Last summer, when we had the horrendous murder of those young girls [in Southport], there was already a real sense of tension in the north. People have watched their town centres falling apart, their life has got harder over the last decade and a half… I don't remember a time when people worked this hard and had so little to show for it.' She referenced again the 'huge pressures on housing'. And then said: 'All of that has fuelled a real sense of anger about what people are being asked to put up with. And it all really came to a head around Southport, because, you know, your children being safe, your community being a decent place to live. It was one of those absolute flashpoint moments… a moment of release. I don't mean the violent organised thuggery. People rejected that very strongly here, but people want to speak out, to be heard.' The notion of something going up in flames suggests that one spark could ignite a conflagration. 'That's what happened last summer.' Could it happen again? 'It could do. I mean, we are not complacent about it all.' I've been visiting the post-industrial north-west for more than three decades and wrote about the decline of the racially and religiously segregated towns of Rochdale and Oldham in my book about the condition of England, Who Are We Now? (2021), which Nandy told me she had read. In a speech in Manchester in July 2019, shortly after he became prime minister, Boris Johnson lamented the decline of the old mining and mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 'The story has been, for young people growing up there, one of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they'll get out and never come back.' Johnson promised to 'level up' the north but the Conservative wish to reduce regional inequalities amounted to little more than rhetoric. Who now speaks seriously of levelling up? 'It was totally discredited,' Nandy said. 'It became very much a group of civil servants being tasked to wander around the north of England, pointing at things and saying 'let's put a bit of money behind that' rather than empowering communities to be able to make that contribution themselves. What we got here in Wigan was a small refund on the money that had been taken from us, but dictated by a group of civil servants in Whitehall as to how we could spend it.' Politics is about place – where people live, go to school, work, interact, play sports, socialise, worship – but what happens when a place loses its purpose? Visiting the former mill towns of the north-west for the first time, I noticed the grandeur of the civic architecture – the High Victorian town halls and arcades, the great churches, the former libraries and exchanges, the miners' and technical colleges – but was dismayed to observe how many of these buildings had been neglected or were derelict, a standing rebuke to generations of politicians who had failed the north. Wigan has not lost its purpose, but it is burdened with social, economic and spatial inequalities, reduced social mobility and diminished aspiration. Mike Danson explained how Wigan is attempting to address these issues. 'In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin described how Abraham Lincoln got various parties to work together during the Civil War for the greater good,' he said. 'In today's communities we are facing huge economic and social problems, but the challenge is to solve them. In Wigan we have a team of 'community anchors'. David Molyneux and Alison McKenzie-Folan at Wigan council are exceptional, similarly our MPs offer a special set of skills. On the sports side, the rugby and the football clubs work together. The combination, with charity and business, shows a unique way of working – our own team of rivals. They are all locals, and they want to create change and a thriving town for the next generation.' One plan is to invest in Al and tech hubs. Wigan has local expertise in sport, sports data and food processing. Josh Simons said: 'We're working to ensure the AI and data revolution actually benefits local people – so food and process manufacturing businesses in Wigan have the latest in AI-powered technology and skills.' On Saturday 17 May, I visited Edge Hall Road in Orrell, three miles to the west of Wigan town centre, for the official opening of a new high-performance centre for women and girls. Edge Hall Road was originally built as the permanent ground of Orrell rugby union club, but in recent years, under the previous ownership of Wigan Warriors, the site had become derelict. Transformed by £350,000 of investment, it is now the new home of Wigan Athletic and Wigan Warriors women's teams and when I visited girls were out on the pitch in small groups playing football and rugby. Simons was there and we chatted again about the social and economic challenges affecting the local community. Like all Red Wall Labour MPs, he is keenly alert to the threat posed by the Reform insurgency. Orrell has 11,000 residents but very limited healthcare. Simons has been working with the Wigan sports group, in partnership with the NHS, to create a new health hub at Edge Hall Road that 'will benefit the whole community'. The key word here is community. A nation is more than an 'imagined community' because our lives are embedded in relationships, institutions and networks. Lisa Nandy used an Orwellian phrase when she spoke to me of the 'country that lies beneath the surface', by which she meant the experience of those who feel submerged, or frustrated, or ignored. Simons said the people he represented were 'angry and they are right to be'. For most people politics is not national, it is experienced locally, through a run-down, boarded-up high street, a bankrupt or impecunious council, an unreliable bus service, uncollected rubbish, a dysfunctional postal service, a school playing field sold to property developers, a GP practice where you cannot get an appointment, a hospital in special measures. If communities beyond the great cities are deprived of investment and opportunity, if economic security and social capital are missing, if the intermediate institutions and places where we gather and interact are absent or become derelict, as the Edge Hall Road site was, people's collective aspiration becomes thwarted. More than a sports club, the regenerated Edge Hall Road is a social asset, 'anchoring' a community, creating a sense of common purpose and belonging. Wigan and the post-industrial north need more of them. [See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain] Related
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Simon Mann was the last of a generation of white mercenaries. What came after may be far worse
Simon Mann, the Old Etonian soldier of fortune who died last week at the age of 72, should have been the coda to the inglorious symphony of the white mercenary in Africa. So madcap, so incongruous was the 'Wonga Coup' he attempted to launch in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 that it seemed to belong to another era. Africa had moved on, old hands declared. Mann, poor fellow, had failed to read the winds of change. Yet far from being a holdover from the past, Mann has proved to be a harbinger of the present. Analysts reckon there are now more foreign mercenaries operating in Africa than ever before. The Russians, in the form of the Wagner Group, were the vanguard of the second wave, arriving in 2017. But others are following in ever greater numbers, Turks, Chinese and Romanians among them – perhaps soon even Americans, with Erik Prince, the founder of the infamous Blackwater mercenary group, reportedly offering Congo his services as part of a putative minerals deal with Donald Trump. Some are shadowy outfits, manned by ruthless racketeers, deployed to advance their states' geopolitical ambitions. Others lay claim to greater respectability. Blanching at the term 'mercenary', they call themselves private military contractors. Many play a vital role in protecting weak governments by training inexperienced national armies, guarding key installations and taking the lead in counterinsurgency operations against Islamist militants. Whatever their role, few of the new generation have the panache of the mercenaries of yesteryear who culminated with Mann. Their era began in the early Sixties, in the years when newly independent African states were struggling to find their feet. From Nigeria and Congo to Angola and the island states of the Indian Ocean, they were on hand – often with the blessing of Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay – to support secessionist movements, prop up feeble governments or mount the occasional coup. Of Mann's forebears the two that most stand out were 'Mad Mike' Hoare, a stiff-lipped Anglo-Irishman and one-time accountant, and Bob Denard, the flamboyant Frenchman with whom he had an unspoken rivalry. Hoare, who bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery, led his motley fighters, the fabled Wild Geese, in defeating Congo's China-backed Simba rebels, who numbered Che Guevara in their ranks, and shoring up the breakaway province of Katanga. He and his 300 men recaptured Stanleyville, later to be renamed Kisangani, from the Simbas, freed 2,000 European hostages, most of them nuns and priests – and then dynamited the vaults of every bank in the city before drinking its taverns dry. It was a tale of derring-do worthy of Empire and made Hoare, who made his men attend church every Sunday, a hero on Fleet Street. Among those who lapped up his antics back home was the young Simon Mann, sitting in the back of a classroom plotting imaginary coups in his atlas. Hoare did much to romanticise the reputation of the white mercenary in black Africa. Yet the image belied a darker reality, too. Some of Hoare's men were German ex-Nazis who still wore the Iron Cross. Most had old-fashioned views on race. Hoare and his Wild Geese had no compunction about shedding blood, decorating their trucks with the heads of Simba warriors they had slain. Hoare, who died in 2020 at the age of 100, may have been a character but, if anything, Denard was even more swashbuckling. He had been in Katanga at the same time as Hoare, leading a unit called 'les affreux' ('the terrible ones'). He later changed sides, was shot in the head by a North Korean soldier, recovered under the care of a nurse and then married her. He reportedly had six other wives, some of them at the same time. After a failed attempt to seize power in Yemen and Benin, he turned his attention in 1977 to Comoros, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, launching the first of four coup attempts he made there. Leading just 50 men, equipped with sawn-off shotguns and two dozen cases of Dom Perignon champagne, he toppled the socialist president, who was shot dead 'while attempting to escape'. Denard effectively ran the country for the next decade as head of the presidential guard, a position he lost after the puppet president he installed was also shot mysteriously. Denard was acquitted of the killing but the mounting presidential body count did him no favours. Whatever their flaws, Mann grew up idolising such men. Like them, he would go on to find triumph and disaster on the world's poorest continent. He helped set up Executive Outcomes, which made a fortune protecting Angola's oil fields from rebel attack in the 1990s and was later involved with an offshoot, Sandline International, seeing action in diamond-rich Sierra Leone's civil war. But in an uncanny echo of his two heroes, Mann's mercenary career ended with a ludicrously injudicious coup attempt. In 1981, Hoare attempted to seize power in the Seychelles, flying economy into Victoria, the capital, with a group of mercenaries disguised as members of a beer appreciation society, The Ancient Order of Froth Blowers. Taking their cover too seriously, most of the men had over indulged on the flight. After starting a brawl in the arrivals hall, a customs officer found an AK-47 in one of their bags, prompting a gun battle that ended when Hoare and his men hijacked an Air India flight to get back to South Africa. The mercenaries drank all the champagne on board and were promptly arrested on arrival. In 1995, Denard's final attempt to take back power in Comoros similarly failed after he and his men drifted onto a beach in inflatable dinghies one moonless night only to find the French army waiting for them. Denard, who died in 2007, spent 10 months in a French prison, Mad Mike Hoare 33 months in a South African one. Mann, whose father and grandfather both captained England at cricket, did more time than both of them combined after a fantastical plot, allegedly concocted in 2004 in the hallowed surroundings of White's, the club in St James's, to overthrow Obiang Nguema, then, as now, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea. The conspiracy was ludicrously complicated, with Mann buying an old Boeing 727 to fly his mercenaries from South Africa to Equatorial Guinea, making a detour in Harare to pick up weapons. The plan was then to fly across the continent to meet an advance party already in Equatorial Guinea, storm the presidential palace and then install a little-known exile as the country's new leader. The problem for Mann was that the entire plot had been blown wide open even before his crew left South Africa. Mann and his team were promptly arrested on arrival in Zimbabwe, where he would serve four years before being transferred to complete a further 13 months in Equatorial Guinea's notorious Black Beach prison. Mann's outfit had neither the intelligence nor the infrastructure in place to succeed, notes Piers Pigou, a Johannesburg-based analyst who has long studied mercenary operations in Africa. 'It was a bit of a Heath Robinson operation,' he said. 'I think everyone was surprised that they ran such a leaky ship, which enabled the authorities in South Africa and therefore Zimbabwe and Equatorial Guinea to be prepared. I still look at that coup and wonder how on earth they think they could have succeeded.' Mann's failed coup seemed like a final hurrah for white mercenaries in Africa. It was certainly an anomaly. By the turn of the millennium, African economies were growing, democracy was on the rise and, though many countries remained chronically weak, conflict was on the wane. Alas, it was not to last. By 2017 a new breed of mercenary had begun to appear in Africa in the form of the Wagner Group, which offered armed services in exchange for access to natural resources – deals remarkably similar to the one Mann and his co-conspirators hoped to strike in Equatorial Guinea. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner's founder, may have lacked the class of the those who ploughed the same furrows in earlier decades: he did not swill champagne like Denard or recite Shakespeare like Hoare. He did not even go to Eton. But, at least in some cases, Wagner was crudely effective. Hired by Faustin-Archange Touadera, the president of the Central African Republic, Wagner beat back the country's Islamist rebels, though it imposed a huge cost. To this day, the CAR remains virtually a Wagner colony, Mr Pigou says. Wagner was nominally dissolved following Prigozhin's death in a mysterious plane crash in 2023 weeks after he marched on Moscow in an attempted rebellion of his own. The outfit, now controlled more directly by the Russian state, continues to prop up half a dozen African governments, most of them military dictatorships, and has faced numerous accusations of perpetrating massacres and other abuses. Other state-linked mercenary outfits of varying quality have also appeared on the scene. Chinese private military groups operate in more than a dozen African states, mainly to protect China-run oil facilities, mines and infrastructure projects, guard logistics routes and protect Chinese nationals against the rising threat of kidnapping. Chinese mercenaries may be authorised by Beijing to carry and use weapons in Africa but, unlike Wagner, they do not directly prop up authoritarian regimes or intervene in internal politics. Other foreign groups are more overtly engaged in fighting. Last year, Sadat, a Turkish private military force with ties to the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reportedly suffered casualties while engaging with Islamist insurgents in Niger. Sadat, which insists that it does not provide 'paramilitary or mercenary services', says its focus is on strategic consultancy, military training and protecting important economic facilities. Not all mercenary groups deliver on the bold promises they make. In 2022 the Congolese government hired 1,000 predominantly Romanian mercenaries, who became known as 'the Romeos', to defend eastern cities against the country's M23 rebels. But when the rebels advanced on Goma and Bukavu, the two biggest cities in the east, in January, the Romeos cut and ran, abandoning their weapons and vehicles as they fled for the safety of the UN peacekeeping base. Both cities swiftly fell and the mercenaries eventually surrendered to M23. Not all mercenaries are as rapacious as Wagner or as hapless as the Romeos. Indeed, says Mr Pigou, some do a lot more good than harm. In 2019, Filipe Nyusi, then the president of Mozambique, originally looked to Wagner to fight an Islamist insurgency in the north. After the jihadists humiliated the Russians, killing scores, Mr Nyusi turned instead to a rather different beast, the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), led by Lionel Dyck, a colonel who served in the Rhodesian army. Dyck, who died last year, broadly fits the definition of a mercenary but he always insisted that his group followed the highest international standards governing private military contractors. As a result, it helped prevent countries like Mozambique, with weak indigenous armies, from slipping into chaos and bloodshed. By training Mozambique's police, it also strengthened the country's ability to defend itself in the future, he argued. While DAG has faced criticism in the past, including of carrying out attacks on civilians which it denies, it is a reminder, cautions Mr Pigou, that blanket, knee-jerk condemnation of mercenary activities in Africa is counterproductive. 'There's a cookie-cutter demonisation of the bloodthirsty white mercenary,' he said. 'There are elements of truth in this, but these narratives are predicated on cartoon characters that don't reflect the realities on the ground. 'They miss the kind of sober cost-benefit analysis of what they guys are able to achieve.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
