There are no more generous folk than football fans. All they want to do is spend money. Other people’s.

Hence the chants of moral outrage from Manchester United followers as (hiss) a “tycoon” buys the club.

Their gripe with Malcolm Glazer seems to be that he is a “Yank”, that he looks like Bill Bryson’s dad and, unforgivably, he is not as rich as Roman Abramovich. If he were, they would welcome him with open wallets, wave the Stars and Stripes and accept Michael Jackson as chief youth team scout.

The fans’ favourite refrain is “the chairman should dip his hand in his pocket to buy players”, even if the fans are too mean to buy a round of drinks. And football is not small beer: a Congolese left-back with a dodgy ankle, coke habit and silly haircut can be worth more than the industrial output of south Wales. It doesn’t take deep pockets so much as bottomless pits.

Fans roared approval as United grew richer, driving smaller clubs to ruin in vain attempts to compete. And they cheered when their club was listed on the stock exchange, letting Sir Alex Ferguson splurge £27m (more than most would pay for Somalia) on a rough in a hood called Wayne Rooney.

Yet they cry foul at the effects of turning United into a multinational corporation. Listing was bound to make it a target of tycoons with endless debts. It is fans’ greed for success that endangered the club they love. It reminds you of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter: they chat to a group of oysters until “answer came there none/ And this was scarcely odd because/ They’d eaten every one”.

Glazer has promised just £25m for new talent (which now barely buys a Bolivian reserve team interpreter). If, like Abramovich, he vowed to fritter the entire wealth of the Siberian oilfields on 11 guys kicking a ball he would be called a genius. But there aren’t many Abramovichs, or every club would get one.

Rather than explain this, Harriet Harman made empty noises on telly about how Labour might intervene; er, like that saved Rover. Instead, she could have attacked the fans for their bigoted bile.

Leaner times might await. Good. It might curb spiralling salaries; it could even bring footie closer to the communities it left behind.

So what if it takes an American devil who does not understand the rules of football to teach the red devils the rules of life. ()

• Typically, family doctors are now paid more than £100,000 a year. Few would begrudge them that when a numbskull from Chelski “earns” that a week. But news of their pay hike was swiftly followed by revelations that surgeries are flying doctors in from Germany to make home visits — as our GPs can no longer be bothered to travel further than their chairs.

  Increasingly, if you feel sicker than Tony Blair’s conscience and just want to die quietly in bed, you must dress and stumble to a surgery to contract fresh bugs from other sick sorts during your long wait — before finally being told you might recover as long as you stay in bed. Perhaps the fire brigade will take to advising us that if we want flames put out we will have to bring our burning houses down to the station.

  Health toilers were underpaid and that had to be addressed. But the effect of Labour’s spending spree has sometimes been to pay people more to do less.

  Still, with talk of 35-hour weeks and even seaside donkeys being entitled to an hour’s break for lunch (not to mention free dental check-ups, which went out for mere humans years ago), perhaps we should be grateful if a doctor sees us at all. Increasingly the only things they are making better are their golf swings.

  Sun, sand, sex and no pretence

  We are exhausted by all the high-minded huffing and there hasn’t even been any low-minded panting yet. I refer to attacks on Celebrity Love Island. The naked aim of the ITV series is to show attractive (ish), famous (ish) folk have sex on screen. It should be applauded for its honesty.

  The possibility of sex on set was, after all, the only lure of Big Brother, yet its dumb contestants believed we were interested in their witterings. At least in this Lady Isabella Hervey, Abi Titmuss, Rebecca Loos and friends know the score. These “celebs” are admitting they are as free of talent as they are of taste, and to remain in the public eye they have to give us, well, an eyeful. How refreshing after Charlotte Rampling rambling on about old actresses not getting enough work. Does she believe Penelope Cruz is paid $2m a flick in Hollywood just for the talent she displays? Her big draw is her sex appeal. The same goes for men now. Puerile though she is, Abi purring makes better viewing than Charlotte moaning.

  Cheating is par for the school course

  Did Prince Harry receive “help” with his coursework? Well if not, his old man should demand an inquiry. Most pupils now cheat. Fraudulent essay writing is the one private sector growth industry. How well you cheat has actually become the test. Charles has shelled out £100,000 worth of Duchy Original biscuits on Eton fees to turn Harry into the, well, whatever he is today.

  Battalions of learned souls should have been doing his coursework for him; Harry would have been at a disadvantage if they weren’t. But this does highlight the con of continuous assessment.

  It was designed to help students who “aren’t very good at exams” — that is, students who aren’t very good. But far from assisting the underprivileged (Labour’s worthy intention) it gave further help to kids with pushy parents, prepared to spend long nights constructing sub-Damien Hirst artworks or surfing the internet for essays. And could there ever be a greater test of parental devotion than that?

• After swing voters, it is the turn of swing politicos, who switch sides out of personal ambition, or pique. I never knew the road to Damascus went via Peterborough before Helen Clark turned Tory straight after losing the seat for Labour. Then we had Lord Adonis, who never really left the SDP, landing a job in government and the Lords.

  Roy Hattersley identified the Sheffield Wednesday effect of politics: the entire team may have changed from the day you first supported it, but you still remain loyal to the club. If you don’t, you are a worm. Yet Blair promotes turncoats such as Shaun Woodward, who has just demonstrated his conversion to socialism by buying a holiday mansion in the Hamptons as a “business arrangement”.