ANOTHER week, another clanger dropped by British racing officials, which seems to suggest that the authorities are not learning lessons from previous dropped clangers, or perhaps they are working so hard to prevent repeats of specific clangers that they have taken their eye off the other potential clangers with disastrous consequences. Either way it’s clangergeddon at High Holborn.

The latest mess concerns the withdrawal of a horse at Nottingham which had caused trouble in the stalls, but instead of telling the Clerk of The Scales that the withdrawn horse was number 17, Operative, who had been unruly. The starter somehow passed the message that number nine, Magic Pulse was the withdrawn.