one-day-week & something I would like included in the Racing Post.

​To quote Lee Mottershead in his top horse racing’s influences in today’s Racing Post. ‘Charles Allen is expected to work around one day a week as B.H.A. Chair when assuming the role in the middle of next year.’ One day a week! How will he ever fit in his role at the B.H.A. with all the other high-salaried position he doubtless holds. There is the rest of the industry working their butts off, either to keep their heads above water or in pursuit of championship ambitions, and there at the B.H.A., the governing body, supposedly, of horse racing in this country, there is someone chairing meetings once a week and being paid a salary that is dreamland for the rest of us. If Lee Mottershead as the Racing Post’s senior columnist is paid more than Mr. Allen it will be because he works more than one day a week!
If I remember rightly, when he was announced as the new Chair, it was said of Mr. Allen that he had knowledge of the sport, though instances of his ‘knowledge’, considering the importance of the position in the sport he was to take-up (eventually), was not all impressive.
Take Dido Harding at the helm of the Jockey Club. She rode as an amateur with some success. She owned Cool Dawn, the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner and wrote an extremely good book about him. According to her book, she borrowed £7,000 from the bank to buy the horse. She had the sense to jock herself off Cool Dawn and have Andrew Thornton ride him in the Gold Cup.
Yes, she messed-up when working for the government during the covid-scam, procuring equipment that was truly needed, wasting millions, doubles billions of tax-payers’ money. But when corruption and stupidity is rife, her period working for Boris and his overlords can be forgiven for the defeat of common-sense in the face of incompetence and ignorance of decades of known science. Anyone of us ensnared in nonsense and strategies of cover-up would fail to.
The point is, her knowledge of the sport involves open ditches, fetlocks, ownership and stable etiquette and routine. 
No one should be employed in this sport at an administrative and especially at a governance level, Chair or C.E.O., who has never dirtied his or her hands at the coal-face of the sport. How many times will Charles Allen ask someone sitting around the board table ‘why do we do that’?

I have nothing against French-bred horses. It is just their names that bug me. The mixing of English and French. The name of the stud, Berlais, for instance, in so many names. The misappropriated ‘, as in Big Buck’s, as an example.
But the French are amongst us and I must accept, also, their dominance. So, given that the editor asked for ideas to be included in the Racing Post, that the industry newspaper report on more than the major races at Auteuil. If you consider that two of the top jump jockeys in France are British-bred, James Reveley and the half-French Felix de Giles, both champion jockeys in France, as well as the well-respected Charly Prichard, and now her fellow female Bryony Frost, ply their trade across the ‘Le Mer’, there should be more than a passing interest for the Post’s readers.
As Scott Burton is based in France, Tom Ellis has a man with experience of the country and the racecourses in the provinces where, it seems, Willie Mullins and his team pluck gems from the flotsam. Even in winter, the Post publishes race-cards from Bahrain and Happy Valley, so why not Pau or Clairfontaine?