It was on both BBC and ITV’s London news, in the national media (here) and in London’s Evening Standard (here) this week: the country’s highest-paid council chief executive is leaving London’s poorest borough after only two years in the job. Despite intense media enquiry and speculation, no-one can or will find out why. This, after all, is the hyper-spun media-manipulating one-party New Labour borough of Newham. Think Peter Mandelson. Think Alastair Campbell. Throw in a budget-busting annual £2.5m publicity spend and you’ll get the picture. But you won’t get the facts.

Joe Duckworth was appointed chief executive just two years ago. It had been a long interregnum since the departure of predecessor Dave Burbage (who Box and Cox’d with Duckworth, ending up in the latter’s previous chief executive job on Isle of Wight council). Duckworth was installed in Newham with the brief of improving delivery of services and preparing the borough for the 2012 Olympics.

However it was his pay that became the story (here). Inevitably there is built-in organisational tension between Newham’s two chiefs, the elected executive mayor and the chief executive. To avoid Blair/Brown-style bad blood, mayor Sir Robin Wales fixed Duckworth with UK councils’ top pay packet of £241,000 a year (over £280,000 with pension and perks) and allowed him to continue to live in the Isle of Wight.

Throughout his two-year tenure Duckworth simply visited the borough for just three days a week and enjoyed a four-day weekend at home on the Isle of Wight.

(I called to see him about an urgent legal issue one Monday earlier this year. I sat on the phone in his plush office in Newham talking to him on the Isle of Wight. “It’s a detailed complicated matter,” he said. “It would be much easier if we could discuss it face to face.” Er… really?)

This was an appalling abuse of taxpayers’ money but Wales arranged it to buy Duckworth’s cooperation and amenability. Power-conscious Wales is the boss and he likes it that way. With classic Canning Town coarseness local people called it ‘Duckworth’s bend-over pay’.

The speculation now is that he will receive a £500,000 golden handshake (here), no doubt partly to buy his silence. The poor taxpayers of this deprived borough are likely to be screwed once again.

Why did Duckworth leave? Two separate sources have indicated the chief executive was escorted (‘frog-marched’ said one) out of the town hall on Tuesday evening. A middle-manager told me council bosses are internally promoting a story that Duckworth gave a £600,000 contract to a friend of his called Steve – which sounds to me like Mandelsonian dark arts of character assassination. Others have spoken of repeated clashes between Wales and Duckworth – which seems unlikely in view of the above.

One thing is for sure, we’ll never know for certain. We don’t know what goes on in Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Why should we know what goes on in Sir Robin Wales’ Newham?

Sport is like economics. There are as many opinions as pundits, and England’s football failure in South Africa has been to the back pages what the September 2008 banking crisis was to the financial pages – the commentariat ballooned to include social, psychological and political analysts and for a couple of days at least England’s early exit engulfed the front pages, the editorial pages and the op-ed pages too.

Even more, sport is like art. It mirrors life. The continued failure of our national football team mirrors an underlying and largely unacknowledged crisis in our national life and reflects the erosion of character, confidence and self-belief – and ultimately of identity.

I watched the team’s passionless effort against the Algerians and initially was angry at these soccer millionaires who seemingly couldn’t be bothered to turn up against the younger hungrier harder-working North Africans. Our underperforming Ferrari-driving soccer stars became – to me at least – objects of derision and disgust, rather like credit-crunch bankers with their bonuses.

Then I looked closer. The team’s jittery performance betrayed not a lack of talent and teamwork but a lack of assurance and conviction – it wasn’t physical skill that was missing but mental and moral strength.

We’d lost the match (well, not won it) before it started. The problem was spiritual. Faced with the biggest of international stages the players once again collapsed internally and collectively were overcome with doubt, fearing they might not win against the Algerian footballing minnows. Inevitably they produced another brittle edgy performance – and didn’t. Fabio Capello highlighted the problem last year (here): when he took over as manager he found “the same players who played well in training played with fear (in the matches), with no confidence, and I said this is a big problem of the mind.”

Why does this football failure mirror and highlight the national lack of confidence if Brits (and Northern Irish) are currently succeeding in other sports (we’ve just beaten the Aussies in one-day cricket; Graeme McDowell won the US Open; Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button are currently one-two in the Formula One drivers table; and at the time of writing Andy Murray is through to the semi-finals at Wimbledon)?

Easy. Football is the people’s game. Cricket, golf, Formula One and tennis, like vicarage croquet, are middle-class sports and during international competitions the national flag is nowhere to be seen outside the competition venue. Football is full-blooded, classless and reaches parts other sports cannot reach – and during the World Cup hundreds of thousands of England flags bedecked homes and cars across all social groups, and especially on council estates and in deprived inner-city areas. It represents ordinary England like no other activity. Famously and only half-joking, former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly articulated the grip of football on English hearts: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you it’s much more serious than that.”

The flag-waving however was simply a bravura show of tribal loyalty and hope that didn’t match the doubting hearts underneath – hearts that in previous eras were more confident, more believing and more self-assured. No one thought that England would actually win the Cup in 2010 and most weren’t surprised when the team failed to shine in the first match against the USA. Following that game, dormant doubt became active self-fulfilling prophecy in players and nation alike, and three games later the Germans – inevitably the Germans – took us apart and dumped us out of the tournament.

Fortunately, while the English have lost their sense of identity and self-belief, they can still take it on the chin – and it’s this that sets them apart from their prickly neighbours across the Channel. While French President Nicholas Sarkozy and colleagues bemoaned Les Blues’ even more ignominious exit from the tournament with haughty Napoleonic mutterings about national disgrace, loss of glory and dishonouring the French colours, the English cried into their beer and got on with their lives.

“At least the crap’s gone so I can now enjoy the football,” said one supporter. “No more anxiety and stress,” said another, “I’m off to watch the Brazilians.”