Is this the death of horse racing?

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, the diplomat who was famously made ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair with the instruction to ‘get up the arse of the White House and stay there’.

Chris added pepper and salt to the niceties of the diplomatic scene: after being ambassador to Germany he agreed with Mark Twain that: ‘A German joke is no laughing matter.’ I enjoyed jousting with him in his days as John Major’s press secretary and the last time I met Chris, at a Jeffrey Archer party, I reminded him of the seating instruction he gave when planning his Downing Street leaving party: ‘Politicians and journalists one end, human beings at the other.’

The horses are being looked after in the heat. Newbury’s arrangements on Saturday were exemplary, with no horses being returned to the winners’ enclosure after races. Instead all were doused down swiftly amid mist fans in a cooling-down area next to the track. It is racing’s human beings who are bearing the brunt of the sport’s current crisis of falling attendances, smaller field sizes, soaring travel and feed costs and insufficient prize money to stop the best horses being bought up to run overseas. The latest two trainers to announce they are closing down their yards are Harry Dunlop and Joe Tuite. I am intimate with neither but respect them both.

Joe Tuite is the kind of decent man who, having found my mobile phone in an Ascot car park took the trouble to see it returned to me. Having undergone a robust racing education by working for Jenny Pitman and then spending eight years as an assistant to Mick Channon, Joe set up on his own in Lambourn in 2010.