Alastair Campbell:
Lest I plunge into a Boris Johnson-style controversy, let me start by saying I like Liverpool. I am also an emotional type who only has to hear a few bars of music at a funeral to feel tears pushing behind the eyes. Let me add that Emlyn Hughes was a very good footballer, deserving of the many medals he won and the many players' tributes paid after his death.
I saw him play, occasionally in the flesh against Burnley, many times on TV for Liverpool and England. By any reckoning his career was a successful one. He then used his personality and passion for life to carve out another successful career on TV. He had a family and many friends, who will miss him. Yet when before the start of the Carling Cup tie between Burnley and Spurs last Tuesday night, the Turf Moor announcer said there would be a minute's silence in his memory, something felt not quite right about it.
The silence was observed perfectly by both sets of fans. The two sets of players stood arm in arm. The substitutes and coaching staffs stood side by side on the touchline, heads bowed. No doubt the Sky TV cameras, making an all too rare visit to a Burnley match, homed in on sad faces and red poppies during this annual season of remem brance. Yet as the whistle sounded and the crowd roared the minute's end, I wondered why Hughes, for all his success and popularity, had been honoured in this way. At half-time and after the match, I realised I wasn't alone.
Now that Hughes's death has merited this commemoration at grounds other than those of his own clubs, do we greet the death of every former England captain in this way, every multiple medal winner, every big character? Or is the judgment a contemporary one about celebrity?
After the game, a fellow sceptic said that he had felt uneasy during the silence. It was not that he did not respect Hughes, or feel sadness. But he spent the minute reflecting on Burnley players whose deaths had been acknowledged with no more than a couple of paragraphs in the matchday programme. And then he asked the question that I think had been bothering me: 'Where do you stop?' I said the question might be: 'Where do you start?' To which he replied: 'Unless it is obvious there should be a minute's silence, don't start at all.'
When Bobby Moore died, it was obvious. The only England captain to have lifted a World Cup; as popular and respected outside the game as in it. It will be the same when Bobby Charlton dies. Clubs will want to pay respect in death because he generates such enormous respect in life. But then the questions begin. Is every World Cup winner worthy of this particular form of tribute? Does Geoff Hurst's hat trick put him in the minute's silence category? Probably. But what about Gordon Banks, the greatest goalkeeper in English football history? Jack Charlton, an international manager as well as player?
Like Hughes, Alan Hansen was a successful Liverpool player and is now a TV personality. If it was the TV personality as much as the footballer being remembered last Tuesday, then is it only Hansen's Scottishness that might rule him out?
Alex Ferguson is a Scot, yet he is a more significant figure in English football history than many English managers remembered in silence. Would his south of the border tributes be confined to Old Trafford?
Gary Lineker qualifies as England captain, good player, good thing and current TV star. So presumably the grounds will fall silent for him? Or if he lives a full life, will he be forgotten because a new generation of celebs will have taken over? Was it the premature nature of Hughes's death that merited the minute's silence?
Do we then consider people for a minute's silence on the grounds that as well as being successful at sport, they also starred on a Question of Sport , as Hughes did? Will Bill Beaumont be remembered at football as well as rugby grounds? Ian Botham? Sue Barker? And before anyone says 'don't be ridiculous', if John Motson were to meet his maker prematurely, does anyone seriously think we would not be rising to our feet?
It is not just Hughes that has had me thinking about death and tributes. The murder of hostage Ken Bigley was so cruel that nobody with a properly functioning brain or heart would have criticised Liverpool's reaction, so the Boris Johnson issue was as much political stupidity as anything else.
Perhaps the reaction to John Peel's death - not just in Liverpool - was more instructive. I suspect that had anyone speculated a few years ago that a disc jockey's death would lead the news, that too might have been deemed ridiculous. But it happened. My reaction to his death, as to Hughes's, was to say to those I was with at the time, how sad it was but then, not having known either of them, to carry on doing what I was doing. Yet in the media mood surrounding Peel's death, to have expressed that at the time would have been to risk being accused of some kind of inhumanity. He being a music and media figure, the media was having the equivalent of a minute's silence.
Likewise, when columnist Lynda Lee-Potter died, you'd have thought from the Daily Mail and from many women columnists on rival papers that journalism's Mother Teresa had fallen, an image that sat ill with many of the unpleasant things she wrote when living. Fleet Street was having a minute's silence.
I wonder whether what is happening is that much of our culture, certainly our media culture, is so brutal to the living that in death there is a desire to make ourselves feel better by describing everyone as 'a great'.
When I worked in Downing Street I was regularly asked by the media for the PM's reaction to a death. It was often a difficult judgment. When Frank Sinatra died, Tony Blair was chairing the G8 summit in Birmingham. The world's media were there, asking for his reaction. He stood to be criticised for saying warm words about someone he had never met, or for being uncaring about the death of an entertainment giant. He spoke. Criticism followed. Had he not spoken, he would have faced a different sort of criticism.
I noticed several commentators turning on him for saying he was 'genuinely saddened' at John Peel's death, suggesting this meant he sometimes felt non-genuine sadness. On the one hand, the media create a mood in which we are all supposed to share.
But when the Prime Minister expresses a genuine feeling, those creating that very mood reserve the right to be cynical and vindictive. I am sure that should the Prime Minister meet his end while his critics are still alive, many would be straight onto the airwaves and into print to say that a huge and great political figure had been lost.
Perhaps what we need is a better balance between praise and criticism when people are alive. Then we might not feel the need to honour so many with a minute's silence.
It would have the added advantage of emphasising the very special nature of the silence to be observed at 11am today, a specialness that now risks being undermined if a minute's silence becomes the common currency for every departing footballer, DJ or journalist.