Ferrari Fails To Finish

This post, motor racing fans may be disappointed to know, is nothing to do with Scuderia Ferrari of Maranello, but refers instead to LBC’s so-called “terrier”, morning show host Nick Ferrari, whose cheerleading in the case of South West Trains (SWT) and sacked ticket clerk Ian Faletto had previously slipped under my radar.

Ferrari has clearly made his mind up about the affair, his view expressed in his Sunday Express column on May 15. Here, he lays into SWT’s “hideous apparatchiks”, who “would rather have a train career into a discarded shopping trolley”, an event which “could have ended in tragedy”. Just how much tragedy an approach speed of 5mph might produce is not told.

In any case, Ferrari knows he is right, as he asserts “The facts of this case couldn’t be more straightforward”. So straightforward, in fact, that Ferrari does not ask why the traction current wasn’t switched off, why no-one else has been disciplined, and what SWT may know that he doesn’t. The affair has also been publicised via Ferrari’s LBC show, and on their website.

And the case was still being run by Ferrari into last week, as his blog entries for May 16, 17 and 18 show. After all, he has already concluded that “Our descent into the nightmarish world of health and safety is now total”, and that “A man who in effect spies on a colleague is rewarded by seeing him get the sack”. Why the CCTV footage from Lymington Pier station was inspected, as with anything else about the case, is not something that detains Ferrari.

But he may be spared the ignominy of being made to look a fool: Ferrari is taking a break from his LBC Breakfast Show next week. Into the great man’s shoes, for one week only, steps Iain Dale, who may have checked out the story a little more thoroughly, but then again, he may not.

There is potential yet for LBC to come out of this affair with its reputation even more tarnished than the Mail, Telegraph, and all the others who called the score before stopping to think. Much may depend on whether Iain Dale looks before he leaps.