Sense of perspective

The Soviets had sent a dog into space before they sent Yuri Gagarin. When the astronaut Gagarin, after his feat, came to London, he was mobbed by admiring crowds, an adulation which, at the height of the Cold War, alarmed some of Harold Macmillan’s ministers. It took the old maestro himself to put things into perspective. ‘Just be thankful,’ he told his Cabinet, ‘that they didn’t send the dog.’

Jump racing, too, needs a sense of perspective. With the finances of British racing, following a European Court ruling, in the hands of m’learned friends and potentially facing meltdown, and with the hunting ban on the way, many are rushing round insisting, ‘We’re all doomed.’ There are daunting problems to be solved and worries about the future supply of point-to-point horses for jumping when hunting goes. But in the end financial problems are technicalities. As another former Tory PM Sir Alec Douglas-Home used to say when confronted by questions on economics, ‘We have frightfully clever people whose job it is to sort these things out.’