A similar scheme sharply cut acid rain in the United States and even Mr Jones has admitted that it is “the right approach”.But under his pressure, ministers have been planning to relax the limits – a move which could help undermine the whole European pollution market, making the scheme worthless.. Those that fail to meet them can buy extra permits from those that have done well, creating a market in pollution. But last week, in an important speech on global warming the Prime Minister said: “We have to act, and we have to act now.”Mr Jones has called the plans – which set a limit on the amount of greenhouse gas that a firm can emit – as “hell on earth” and claimed that they “imperil every single manufacturing job in Britain”.However, Mr Blair insisted that it was “false” to suggest that there was “a trade-off between economic growth and the environment” and added that, over global warming “the costs of not acting are overwhelmingly greater than any short-term cost of action”.Conscious that their plans risked undermining trust in the Prime Minister even further, ministers are reconsidering them over the weekend. Tony Blair’s credibility will once again be on the line on Tuesday when his government presents Britain’s plans for curbing carbon dioxide emissions from industry to the European Commission. “Everything was football – I just read football magazines.”The initiative would have appealed to the late Danny Blanchflower, who captained Tottenham Hotspur’s Double-winning team in 1961. Having spent some time at St Andrews University, the cultured Ulsterman had no time for trivial pursuits. While the cards turned, Blanchflower read, lost in his own world.

I know what his choice of books would have been: The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald.. However, few of the players I knew as a teenage professional two decades later would have listed reading as an extra-curricular activity. The former Charlton and Sheffield Wednesday player Mark Bright, speaking in support of a scheme to encourage young fans to expand their literary horizons, admitted that he didn’t read much when he was younger. They were more likely to be found in a snooker hall than a library. Card-playing was, and remains, the preferred means of eating up time on travels.Recruited at an early age, the football aspirant is seldom made aware of life’s larger picture.

“Intelligent, for a footballer,” was the patronising phrase one critic used when referring to the performance of a television pundit.My father, a professional footballer in the great depression of the 1930s, was an avid reader Marx and Engels fuelled his commitment to socialism. Getting a largely negative response, he muttered: “You could at least watch the bloody history channel.”
The notion that scholarship and sport are not congenial cultures has been with us since the advent of professionalism more than a century ago. Take the story of a Premiership manager who sought proof of intelligent life in the dressing room “How many of you read books?” he asked. George Bush can now respond only by formally renouncing all such practices and, more important, the connection with Middle Eastern states that have tortured on behalf of the world’s only superpower.Henry Porter is the author of ‘Empire State’, a novel set in the post-9/11 world which deals with the issue of torture by the US. Mayo Smith, a baseball manager, once said, “Open up a ballplayer’s head and you know what you’d find? A lot of little broads and a jazz band.” The footballer as dunce is an ancient metaphor, guaranteed to get a cackling response at corporate lunches and testimonial dinners.