The fall out between precocious diving impresario Tom Daley and his long-suffering partner, Blake Aldridge, is not, as The Guardian pointed out today, the first time a sporting partnership has ended in tears.
In fact, after Aldridge’s outburst against Daley – and I’m not going to go into exactly what was said, because his comments have been so well reported that it’s difficult to find a newspaper article which doesn’t include the words ‘I saw my mum in the audience…’ – the pair can successfully add their names to a long list of twosomes which have gone awry after one partner blamed the pair’s failings on the other.
French Connection saw its share prices plummet after the company’s owner, Stephen Marks, split with his wife and creative director Alisa in 2003. “It was the first time in British share history that a relationship split was effectively the subject of a stock exchange announcement,” Nick Mathiason wrote in The Observer later.
And this month, as ‘silly season’ began to cause panic among news-starved hacks (‘Cat's daily routine baffles owner’, anyone?), newsrooms everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief as stories of yet more bickering between Gordon Brown and his irrepressible predecessor flooded in.
This time, Brown – clearly at a loss over how to kill time on holiday – had composed a lengthy memo detailing Blair’s many failings. In a moment of pure Blake Aldridge malice, Brown accused the former prime minister of a ‘lamentable confusion of tactics and strategy’, and in doing so came very close to ‘blow[ing] a hole in the heart of government’, The Guardian said later.
While the Blair/Brown and Daley/Aldridge tussles provide light relief for desperate journalists with space to fill, they also provide a serious lesson for those thinking of entering into a business partnership. Be very careful who you work with. Your decision could come back to haunt you.
