It should have been a pure PR triumph. Successful figures, the extended lock down agreement and the unveiling of the Herbert Chapman-style bust of Arsene Wenger.

But the chairman’s handling of yesterday’s Annual General Meeting managed to take the gloss off for this attendee.

Peter Hill-Wood does not look in the best of health. I used to think the bumbling fool routine was a bit of an act. But there was little doubt yesterday that the man is no longer capable of chairing an Annual General Meeting of a company of Arsenal’s significance. His hearing has gone and he had difficulty speaking. He seemed to have trouble even seeing very far and as for his state of mind…

Questions to the board can be pre-submitted and some are selected to be answered by the board - specifically, the chairman reading out the answers off a piece of paper. This is a good idea in that some of the obviously common questions can be addressed before questions are invited from the floor. In recent years, shareholders or proxies have had the answers from pre-submitted questions, then a speech from Arsene Wenger, followed by questions from the floor before the conclusion of the meeting.

Questions from the floor are key to the integrity of the meeting as it allows shareholders to ask questions that the board may not feel comfortable answering, for instance making commitments on certain issues. I myself asked (from the floor) before the move to the new stadium, whether club level season ticket holders would be given priority when it came to future cup final ticket allocations. The reason I asked was because I did not want this to happen and for the potential for a campaign against such a policy to be launched if the club were planning to implement it. There was some consultation amidst the board members before Keith Edelman made the commitment that club level did not equal priority.

However, once in recent years, the chairman did not allow for questions from the floor and it happened again yesterday. Additionally, at a previous AGM, during questions from the floor, Arsene Wenger was called upon to answer one and the chairman took his response to that as his traditional AGM speech to shareholders, which it patently wasn’t. Whatever words Wenger had prepared for that day remain unheard as Hill-Wood never gave him another opportunity to address the meeting.

Unfortunately, in forgetting (a cynic might argue deliberately as he was in no mental condition to answer anything without a script, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt) to open the meeting to the floor, Hill-Wood had to end the meeting in a way that made the board look foolish.

As he was closing the meeting, author and football business guru Alex Fynn felt impelled to stop him and request some acknowledgement for the role that David Dein had played in bringing the club to where it was today. He is a friend of Dein’s and knows Arsene Wenger well.

Now if the chairman had asked for questions from the floor, the recognition of Dein’s contribution (and he may be public enemy number one now, but in truth, Wenger would almost certainly not have been the Arsenal manager were it not for Dein) could have been handled in a less controversial context. As it was, the interruption of the chairman – and Hill-Wood’s subsequent acknowledgement and apology, ended the meeting on an unfortunate note.

A bit of me wonders if Hill-Wood will even be alive for the chairing of the next AGM for it to be an issue as far as he is concerned. But if he still is alive and kicking in October 2008, then the board should seriously consider getting someone else to take charge of the AGM. It ill befits an outfit of Arsenal’s reputation to put on such a shambles. And the suspicious might even look at the stage managing of the event (without the possibility of any genuinely spontaneous offerings) as something akin to communist Russia – an irony given the reasons for the extended lockdown and Alisher Usmanov’s own history of influence in the media in Uzbekistan.

If Usmanov were unable to secure over the 90% he required to take the club private, the one chance the remaining shareholders would have to make the man accountable is asking questions at an AGM – and in that context there would be uproar if there were no questions from the floor. These were definitely scheduled for yesterday, but due to the chairman just did not happen.

There is a belief that Sir Chips Keswick and Lord Harris of Peckham were drafted onto the board so that there was a ready-made replacement in case Hill-Wood had to step down as chairman. Perhaps now is the time to consider that.

You will read about all the good news from the AGM elsewhere on the internet. There’s no need to replicate that here. But on a personal note, I do have to say what a moving moment it was when Arsene’s wife was brought on to unveil the sculpture of Le Boss with the attendant standing ovation. Arsene’s smile as he made his speech and cracked a few jokes showed a man content with his work. And why the hell shouldn’t he be? He has transformed Arsenal from the time he arrived in 1996 into one of the world’s top clubs. And with the financial plan, the future looks very rosy as long as the club is controlled by a board that decides re-investment in the club is preferable to the extraction of profits.

So well done to Arsene and the board. But as for the chairman…