To operate system: 1. Engage brain…

  • 10 years ago
  • 1

…2. Then open mouth.  Or in today’s technology-saturated world: 2. Turn on phone/computer, compose text/email, (offensive and abusive about several people, not least the one who pays your salary) and press ‘send’. 3. Prepare yourself for the opprobrium of the masses who are unimpressed with your-now public- misogynistic, racist and puerile missives. 4. Engage a good, (make that ‘no miracle, no fee’) legal team. 4. Issue grovelling apology. 5. Look for a new job. Oh dear me, clearly no one at Cardiff City had listened to Horace Rumpole when he offered the sagacious advice to, “never commit anything to writing that you would not be happy to put before a judge”.  This week, Messrs Mackay and Moody, (sounds like a firm of undertakers), must be rueing how they committed the ultimate faux pas of the 21st century; that is committing contentious and objectionable thoughts to the modern equivalent of paper – the medium of the electronic word.  Because as sure as the sun rises in the morning, it will come back to bite you in your nether regions.  A slander case has always been more difficult to make stick than one for libel, for very obvious reasons; but what cannot speak cannot lie and incriminating communications recorded for perpetuity do tend to hoist an individual by their own petard.

I suppose the most egregious mistake Malky and Ian, (now that makes them sound like children’s’ TV presenters) made, was to treat a self-made billionaire – not even just a millionaire – as a complete f£$*7g moron. The Malaysian gentleman may be eccentric in his ways, but as the person who owns the entire MacDonald’s franchise for Malaysia, you can be sure that he knows exactly how many chips are in a Happy Meal.  The LMA or managers’ trade union may be desperately trying to pass off as ‘friendly banter’ Malky’s reference to “the chink” and his description of a Korean midfielder and his representatives as “fkn chinkys”, but I think that it falls into the same category as Big Ron Atkinson when he called the Chelsea player a “big lazy N…”.

You may well be questioning what this unseemly affair has to do with my honourable profession (stop rolling your eyes).  Well it appears that there are plans for several websites to be launched, akin to Trip Advisor and the like, that allow tenants to rate landlords and agents, commenting on their performance and rating them out of ten.  Firstly, I immediately wondered whether the sister website was being launched to allow landlords to rate tenants… The concern that I have is that if these ideas to ‘benefit the rental industry’ come to fruition, the ‘wrong’ entry, (however accurate and beneficial to any future landlord or agent) about a tenant could result in a brick through the office window or any other associated building and the ‘wrong’ entry about a landlord or agent could possibly result in the tenant finding it very difficult to rent a new property.  No one benefits.

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