Defender Sol Campbell is very highly regarded in football circles.

God knows why, as to me he’s one of the very worst examples of the modern footballer.

Granted, he’s not an arse like Ronaldo, or bordering on evil like Craig Bellamy or spitting sensation El Hadji Diouf.

He’s also a rare thing indeed in football as he can string a sentence together and almost appear charming.

However, make no mistake, this is a man who is firmly and totally out for number one.

His walking out of his 40k a week (more than a good many of of us earn a year) five year contract at Notts County after just ONE game is typical of a man who does not give two hoots about the people who spend large amounts of their hard-earned cash on watching him running around a pitch for 90 minutes a week.

Campbell has history – as fans of his former club Tottenham will testify.

A hero at White Hart Lane, it was well known Campbell would soon move to a bigger club to showcase his undoubted talents at a higher level.

However, he wasn’t sold, paying the club back for its loyalty to him in bringing him through the ranks.

Instead, he decided to let his contract run out, guarateeing a fat signing on fee and a massive wage for whichever club he decided to move to – and losing Spurs about £10 million, which was an enormous sum back then, rather than the rather paltry amount it seems nowadays.

The catch of course is he walked out on them to join their fierce rivals Arsenal.

Thhis leads to a savage reception every time he’s returned to White Hart Lane.

Such is the rage directed at Campbell at White Hart Lane, several fans were arrested last season when he returned with Portsmouth.

At the start of this season, Sol made the unlikely move of signing for Notts County, a bottom tier club which has just been taken over by super-mega-rich Arabs aiming to take them to the Premier League.

To County, who had already entice super-shagging, money-mad former England manager Sven Goran Eriksson to Meadow Lane on a massive contract, signing Campbell was a massive coup – a real statement of intent.

But it quickly turned sour.

Campbell made his debut vs Morecambe and then decided he wanted out, apparently unhappy at the direction the club was moving in.

What did he expect in the third division? The football is horrible, based on hoofing and kicking each other.

And in typical fashion, his giant ego kicked in and he decided it was all beneath him, despite the massive efforts of the club to accomodate him.

It’s typical Campbell behaviour.

If I was chairman of Notts County before releasing him from his contract I would have insisted on a payment to reimburse every fan who had bought a shirt with Campbell’s name on the back, every fan who went along to see him and every single season ticket holder who had been filled with hope at his signing.

Sadly, there’s more chance of me being their next big money signing and my personal hope is that football clubs turn their collective backs on him.

Although he’s already pocketed £160,000 from County for his month of “service”, which just makes you want to puke.

As the fallout from the Megrahi release row continues, Gordon Brown has emerged as the villain of the piece, a man who has sold whatever principles he claimed to have for Libyan oil and gas. While this is a depressing situation for the British public, the reality is that this sort of double standards when dealing with oil-rich, wealthy but unpalatable foreign characters is nothing new in British politics.

To find further evidence of such dodgy behaviour, one need only look back 20 years to the 1980s – the decade that ethics forgot. It was perhaps Al Yamamah – the name for a series of record defence contracts awarded to British Aerospace Systems and other British companies by Saudi Arabia in return for over half a million barrels of oil per day to the British Government – that was most infamous for long-running allegations of slush fund payouts to influential Saudi diplomats.

Scandal aside, the real ethical chicanery began when, in December 2006, The Daily Telegraph broke the news of how the Saudis were pressuring the government to drop the Serious Fraud Office investigation or face losing a lucrative Eurofighter contract. Needless to say that by the end of the month, the SFO had discontinued the investigation.

However, it must be noted that government is all about difficult choices and while most of us have the luxury of pontificating grandiosely from the sidelines about our supposed ethics, politicians, from time to time, find themselves in the rather unfortunate position of having to choose between two or more tricky decisions, none of which will leave them in a particularly good place: does one stand by ones principles on freedom, justice and equality – those ideals on which Western democracies are founded – but risk losing out on billions of pounds of investment?

I personally would like to think that I wouldn’t idly set my morals aside for Gulf petrodollars, but I guess we all have our price in the end.