'Being a Group 1-winning trainer hasn’t changed anything - the sport still beats you up every day and I just wish we had a dictator running it'

It’s been eight years since my last column for the Racing Post and a lot has changed in racing since then – but some things are exactly the same. 

Royal Ascot, for example, was brutal, the way it always has been. We took a bit of a battering, but it was a fantastic meeting as long as you went there prepared for the nature of the beast.

We took ten or so runners and nothing much below 20-1, and I'm a proper realist, so I was just hoping some might nick a place and if we were lucky we might get a winner, but things didn't pan out for some of the better ones.