Why Qatar is done with saying sorry for human rights and equality issues

“Pipes. You need them. I got them right here.” The words, there, of Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy Qatar 2022, speaking in Doha on Thursday morning.

Actually that’s not correct. In fact this is a line spoken by an unnamed door‑to‑door crack cocaine salesman in the TV series The Wire, during a sequence where the Baltimore police department experiments by decriminalising drugs in an abandoned neighbourhood. Addictions reach desperation level. The city’s dealers create their own vision of entrepreneurial hell.

And everyone gets a lesson in life-or-death commodity capitalism.

Thawadi didn’t say anything about pipes. Instead, responding to some fairly mild expressions of concerns over LGBTQ+ rights from Gareth Southgate, he said: “Somebody with a lot of influence like Southgate, somebody with a big audience that listens to what he says has got to choose his words very carefully.”

Thawadi went on to imply Southgate was ignorant and that he had failed to investigate properly the issues raised. And the message was clear enough. The secretary general of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, who has spent a very long time listening politely to this stuff, and being emollient and conciliatory, isn’t going to take it any more.

Later that day Thawadi told the president of the Norwegian Football Federation, Lise Klaveness, that she needed to “educate” herself before presuming to express moral qualms about a World Cup procured via a Fifa committee riddled with corrupt individuals. Not to mention staged in a nation where, frankly, Klaveness would be ineligible to be president of anything because she is gay, and therefore a member of a criminalised class. So yeah. Education.