About the most anyone can say for Eddie Hearn this week is that at least he does not window-dress his cynicism.

Forced to find ever more specious ways to justify staging Anthony Joshua’s rematch with Andy Ruiz in Saudi Arabia, a country looking to boxing as the latest conduit for masking its atrocious human rights record, Essex’s very own Jerry Maguire explained how he could best exploit the association with a malignant regime. “Sometimes the criticism and the curiosity will lead to an event of extraordinary magnitude,” he said. Never mind the stonings or the public executions, in other words, or the recent audio recording of the torture and murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Just feel those pay-per-view numbers.

Ever since he took over fight-night promotions from his inimitable father, Barry, who claimed to have missed his son’s birth because he was tied at 1-1 in a best-of-three at Romford snooker hall, one property that Hearn Jnr has been conspicuously effective at marketing is himself. “Even Dad calls me a silver-spoon kid,” he told me once at his Brentwood mansion. “I am. But the great news is that I have turned it into gold.”​

David Haye picked up on this penchant for self-aggrandisement ahead of his first bout with Tony Bellew. “Everything’s the Eddie Hearn show,” he lamented. “All he does is jump in front of the cameras. I tried to watch a Katie Taylor interview the other day, and he just barged her out of the way. ‘Here we go, apples and pears.’” When Haye was duly vanquished three months later, Hearn leapt into the ring within two seconds of the knockout.​

Bellew, his own fighter, had the good grace to react with disdain.​

Tony Bellew and promoter Eddie Hearn before Bellew's workout in 2018 credit: REUTERS

Now that Edward of Arabia is making his first foray into Middle Eastern sportswashing, he has seen to it that he assumes star billing once more. When a press conference was called at the Savoy to confirm the fight, first revealed by Gareth A Davies in Telegraph Sport, one might reasonably have assumed that two crucial attendees would be Joshua and Ruiz themselves.​

Instead, the occasion was a fireside chat between Hearn and Omar Khalil, spokesman for the Saudis’ official event sponsor, which could scarcely have been more gushing than if scripted by a cultural attache in Riyadh.​

It has taken less than a week, but already a certain weary acceptance has settled over this dismal cash-grab. Yes, the consensus goes, it is a spectacle of fathomless moral turpitude, but this is boxing, and who seriously expects any better? After all, the “Rumble in the Jungle”, the most celebrated moment in the history of the heavyweight division, was held in Kinshasa for the glorification of that despicable kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko, who built a palace of Versailles-like extravagance while his people starved. Similarly, the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” was designed to create some flattering gloss on the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, who had declared martial law in the Philippines just three years earlier.​

Hearn, clearly, would like his own production to be woven into the same tapestry as those classics. “This event could change boxing forever,” he boasted, with all the persuasiveness of Del Boy flogging car radios from Albania. If so, he might care to employ a more creative PR guru than the soul, who, seemingly forgetting the virtue of rhyme or alliteration in glamorising prizefights – “the Scrap in the Scrub,” perhaps? – came up with the “Clash on the Dunes”. It sounds more like a tear-up on the beach in Bognor Regis than any kind of epochal occasion for the sport.​

Eddie Hearn and Omar Khalil, Managing Partner of Skill Challenge Entertainment, official event partner in The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia credit: GETTY IMAGES

Hyperbolic sales pitches aside, there is a far more sinister dimension to this circus in the Gulf. Hearn, by his own admission, is a “hustler for a pound note”, but he is also worldly enough, as the son of a self-made millionaire from a Dagenham council estate, to understand the soup in which he is swimming. For his set piece at the Savoy, he turned up with a list of watertight examples of how global sports could succeed on Saudi soil. Well, he thought he did. As it turned out, he confused Formula One with Formula E, and cited the case of WWE, whose stock fell after their dalliance with the Forbidden Kingdom last year.​

For anyone with irons in this particular fire, there is an almost wholesale suspension of critical faculties. In a 14-minute interview segment on Sky Sports, which is broadcasting the fight on Dec 7, not a single question about the human rights situation was posed. This is despite Amnesty International raising continued concerns about Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on lawyers, women’s rights activists and members of the Shia minority.

When, eventually, Hearn was asked about sportswashing, he said he had never heard of the term, insisting glibly that any political matters were far beyond his pay grade. Except Hearn has accepted an estimated £33 million from Saudi sports entities to put on this fight. That makes him, whether he likes it or not, a pawn in a grubby political game.

Odd, is it not, that whenever Hearn is in full salesman mode, he purports to be the smartest, shrewdest operator in the business, and yet when he is pressed on the broader consequences of a decision, he resorts to playing the wide-eyed ingénue, shrugging that geopolitics is “way above my head”. One thing is true: where this greedy, soulless, misconceived Saudi enterprise is concerned, Hearn is already in far over his head.