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Dick, Balls and Glasscock

Tony Horne reckons there's a lot in a name. Especially if you're called Dick. Or Balls. Or Glasscock. Or Clegg. OK, I made that one up.

By Tony Horne

19 Jul 2011, 09:03

Time to be a schoolboy again, and laugh at Cressida’s surname. Let’s face it - when you’re called Dick it takes the gloss off so much of what you do.

In these early hours of course you have to give everyone a fresh start and you will shout me down and tell me not to be such a child but I guarantee at some point that surname will sit uncomfortably in a headline somewhere in the future. I am almost writing one now about the Vice Squad. This, of course, is exactly why Ed Balls should never have been the Prime Minister. Well, obviously, that’s not the only reason. You can spin all you like but when the wheels are coming off, it would be one Balls Up after another in every tabloid going. Frankly, it’s too easy.
I spotted this many years ago, genius that I am!

Alistair Darling, darling, you just about got away with it!  So staggered was I that anyone would not change their name long before attempting to hold such high office and that their naivety didn’t see this day coming that I invented a feature on my now defunct radio show entitled Ed Balls Syndrome – People in the news with funny names.

And of course, just like a doctor telling you’ve caught something, once you have made the diagnosis you see it everywhere. I became a hypochondriac Dot Cotton just for names, and went looking for them!

I would have to stop news bulletins because it just made stories so unbelievably distracting.

First there was an Ann Robinson, a talking head for USwitch, and then it just got worse. Along came Ban Ki-Moon and I was on a roll. If I had a pound for the number of Glasscocks I had had over the years, well...do your own punchlines!

You watch. Now, I’ve mentioned it, you’ll see it everywhere too, and every time you’ll remember the smile on your face rather than the story they are commenting on or at the centre of. Nothing other than a faultless performance of authority can save poor Cressida from this fate. At some point, even if unfairly, someone will say the words “Dick by name...”

You are hereby forewarned!

Right, off to watch a programme about the history of German football. This week, there’s a profile on Stefan Kuntz and Ralf Minge.  

EDITOR'S NOTE: I can't believe you missed out Danny Shittu...