Future of Phipps in the balance

The future of Jeremy Phipps, the Jockey Club's security chief, could be decided today at a meeting of the Portman Square hierarchy.

The meeting has been called to discuss the fall-out from Sunday's Panorama programme on corruption in racing, but the fate of Phipps is likely to be high on the agenda.

Sunday's TV exposȬ which attracted 3.9 million viewers, included offensive comments made by Phipps about his employers in a secretly recorded meeting with Roger Buffham, his predecessor at the Jockey Club.

Those comments, plus a subsequent embarrassing interview with one of the Panorama investigators, resulted in many calls from within the industry for him to resign.

In Monday's Standard Sport, racing pundit John McCririck, said: "Being a man of honour, Jeremy Phipps has no option but to fall on his sword as his naive stupidity shames the Jockey Club."

Other critics include Michael Caulfield, chief executive of the Jockeys' Association, who has questioned whether Phipps can continue to carry the confidence of the industry and Michael Harris, the representative of the racehorse owners.

Harris questioned whether the former SAS officer came across as "a natural choice to head the security of racing".

However, it would come as no surprise-if the Jockey Club hierarchy, which have been fighting a strong rearguard action since the Panorama programme was broadcast, closed ranks.

Meanwhile, Panorama producer Stephen Scott has hit out at the jockeys who slated his investigation into corruption and repeated his claim that he has enough material at his disposal to warrant another programme about racing.

Scott spent yesterday digesting that estimated viewing figure of 3.9m for a documentary which has had an explosive effect at all levels of racing.

The figure amounts to four times the number of people who tuned in to see Marienbard win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe earlier in the day - and over a million more than who watched the previous Sunday's Panorama programme on the Iraq crisis.

Scott, who described news of the ratings as "very satisfying," insists that several factions within the industry closed ranks in order to mask the extent of wrongdoing and warned certain critics from the weighing room about the dangers of a selective memory.

"Some of the ex-jockeys who lined up to criticise the programme seem to have conveniently forgotten their own background in the last 24 hours," he said.

Scott is also sifting through new material which has come to light in the wake of Sunday's programme, including alleged material on a leading bookmaker and more than one Jockey Club member.

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