Great News: Racing's Chairman Search Is a Total Mystery. Terrible News: So Is Everything Else.

A trade practised by sane people

The best recruitment processes I've been through had one thing in common: at some point, somebody stopped asking me questions and made me actually do a bit of the job, there in the room, where a wrong answer couldn't be smoothed over later with an emollient follow-up email. I mention this with some authority, having once written an entire book on the subject — The Perfect Fit — which left me with a settled view of the only question worth asking a candidate: not what would you do, but show me. Everything else is theatre.

My plumber understands this instinctively. Describe a leak the size of Rutland Water and he asks two questions — where's the stopcock, and have I got a bucket — not what his leadership style is or how he sees himself contributing to a complex stakeholder environment involving the ceiling and next door's cat. He looks, he thinks, he fixes it.

British institutional recruitment abandoned that approach decades ago, nowhere more completely than in the hunt for a new chairman of British racing, a search run with the transparency of a Trappist monastery. Racing has been without a chairman since March, when Lord Allen departed after six months, which is not so much a tenure as a long weekend. And of all the decisions racing will take this decade, this is probably the most important — an odd thing to treat as a scheduling inconvenience.

The interview that never happened

Into this vacancy stepped Peter Savill: 78, six years as chairman of the old British Horseracing Board, backed by 250 owners, trainers, breeders and racing managers, armed with an actual plan built from actual conversations with the people who run the sport. He committed the one unforgivable sin of modern institutional life. He turned up prepared.

According to Savill, the panel did not ask what he thought was wrong with racing, did not ask how he'd fix it, and did not ask him to show, rather than tell, how he'd actually do the job. It did not ask to see the plan. Whatever else is true of Savill — and a man who ran the BHB for six years and still bothers to write a manifesto at 78 has clearly not run out of things to offer — he at least turned up with something that could be read, argued with and marked against results later. Nobody outside the room can say the same of whoever beat him.

Let's watch: the runners nobody's allowed to see

Two other candidates have progressed. Nobody will say who. Not the BHA, not the committee, not so much as a leaked screenshot. Normally I'd already be elbow-deep in the form — background, prior chairmanships, a manifesto public enough to be laughed at if it's rubbish. Instead: two runners, no colours, no declared weight, price unknown, jockey to be confirmed on the day. A sport whose entire business rests on declared runners and public accountability has decided its most consequential appointment can run on less information than a seller at Wolverhampton on a wet Tuesday. Consider this a marker: whoever it turns out to be, they'll get the scrutiny here that racing seems constitutionally unable to apply itself.

How to hire fast, when you feel like it

Here's the part racing would rather you didn't notice. When the BHA needed a chief executive, it moved fast: Brant Dunshea, acting in the role since Julie Harrington departed, was simply made permanent while the chair sat empty. No secret panel weighed his emotional intelligence. Somebody watched him do the job competently and decided there was nothing further worth discovering. Racing can appoint decisively, on the nod of an incompetent board, when it wants to. It just declines to apply that standard to the one job that sits above every faction and occasionally has to tell them no and they need to be replaced.

The threat nobody is fighting

While all this politeness continued, the real danger assembled on the other side of the fence in two ranks, neither seriously challenged by a single racing body. The Gambling Commission has pressed ahead with affordability checks that have already cost racing £1.6 billion in turnover, thresholds of £1,000 in 24 hours or £3,000 over 90 days dragging some 120,000 bettors into document checks and pushing roughly 45,000 towards illegal, untaxed operators. Statements were issued. Concern was expressed. The checks were confirmed anyway.

Meanwhile the corporate bookmakers — Flutter, Entain, bet365 — report profits that would embarrass a sovereign wealth fund and have quietly stopped sponsoring the sport that generates them: Entain dropped the Coral Cup, bet365 walked from Newmarket's Craven meeting and Haydock. Between them they hand racing a Levy worth barely 3 per cent of what they turn over on it — a record £110 million that reads like triumph and feels like an insult with a nicer number attached. Two threats, pulling from opposite directions, and not one body in racing has fought either as though its life depended on it with a competent strategy. It rather does.

What the next chairman actually needs to do

None of this needed six months of listening: prize-money behind Ireland and France, an ownership model that charges a fortune to lose money, a bloated fixture list, turnover leaking to the black market, sponsors backing away as profits climb, racecourses and horsemen behaving like two ferrets in one wellington boot. What racing needs is someone who arrives with an agenda for finance, ownership, betting, government and fixtures, publishes it, and accepts being judged against it — not someone whose leadership style is "inclusive, agile and outcomes-focused."

Savill deserved better than he got, whatever the final verdict on his plan might have been; at least it existed. Get the next appointment wrong and the next crisis arrives exactly as the last one did: a statement, a working group, a stakeholder-engagement framework circulated by email. My plumber, meanwhile, fixed the leak in twenty minutes and never mentioned his journey. British racing could do worse than hire him — at least he'd show you the plan before he started.