Archive
Dog days
I’m not a huge Twitter fan but #waronterrier is pretty funny.
KP nuts
I’ve followed cricket since I was a little lad, from the days when the late Richie Benaud was a player rather than a commentator, and when Trueman and Statham inspired far more fear in the hearts of opponents than Anderson and Broad manage today.
Throughout that time the governance of the game in England has been questionable to say the least, but this week it seems to have lowered its standing still further. A year after sacking Kevin Pietersen, their best player, because he was a maverick whose face didn’t fit, they’ve just concluded a weird and pointless ritual dance by effectively sacking him again, on the very day that he proved conclusively that he is still their best bat by a country mile.
The excuse on offer was a breakdown in trust, between the ECB and Pietersen. Strange that since KP trusted the Board enough to walk away from a £250,000 deal in India to play for Surrey for peanuts in the red ball form of the game, to prove what everyone knew anyway. He did that on the word of the incoming chair of the ECB, and boy, was he let down.
Fact is, for the last several years, nothing has happened in English cricket without the approval of Giles Clarke, the outgoing chair, who hands over next week to one Colin Graves, the man who gave his word to KP, only to have it broken by the new Director of England Cricket, Andrew Strauss, who is, in turn, the man who had to apologise last year when he was caught calling KP a lady part on a live microphone. It might bugger belief that Strauss was allowed to have the final say-so on KP’s future, but he’s a Clarke man through and through, a good Tory. (Giles is the nephew of Tom King, Maggie Thatcher’s Defence Secretary.)
Fact is, although Clarke is leaving office as chairman, he’s still there and everything this week has happened on his watch. Furthermore when he does go he won’t be going far, for he is taking up a newly created post as President of the ECB. If Graves is as pissed off at being portrayed as deceitful in his handling of KP as he is entitled to be, there may be some interesting discussions between those two. But how any of it will benefit English cricket, well, that beats me.
Spot on
It’s been six days since the election and the smoke has cleared.
On May 1 I made a prediction, on this blog. Scroll down and check it out. I was wrong in only one respect, in that I underestimated the scale of Labour’s Scottish disaster. However events are in the process of proving that I was on the ball in suggesting that a minority Tory government would’ve been a better result for Scotland. For all its 56 seats, Scotland has no leverage to apply to force a constitutional settlement that is better than the ‘not quite halfway’ house that the Smith Commission proposed.
We voted powerfully for an SNP Manifesto calling for full fiscal autonomy. Will Cameron acknowledge that and cut a deal? Not a prayer? Will Trident will be removed from Scotland?
A cat in hell would have a much better chance.
Maestro
If Leo Messi ran for public office, I’d vote for him.
On my lifetime there have been a handful of great footballers. As a nipper I grew up hearing stories of Stanley Matthews; then there was Puskas, After him came Pele, Best, Cruyff, and Maradona, each supreme in his era. Then there was a fallow period, with excellent players in Zidane, Ronaldo (El Gordo), Ryan Giggs, (Don’t argue.) and Ronaldinho, not quite on the pinnacle that those predecessors had reached.
We are lucky now in that there are two global superstars on the planet together, each at his peak and both playing in the same league as a bonus. There’s been nothing like it since Di Stefano and Puskas lined up since by side.
Cristiano Ronaldo is possibly the best European footballer ever, so it must frustrate him to be sharing the stage with someone who might be the best player ever to pull on boots, anywhere. CR7 or Messi; each has his supporters. I don’t see the point in choosing between them, but if I had to I would have to pick the little man. He can do everything that Cristiano can do, but he adds on a few things that he can’t.
It’s akin to a choice between a surgeon and a matador.
Make of it . . .
I’ve just been asked three questions by ITV, through YouGov.
1) Have you made up your mind on how you will vote tomorrow?
2) Have you changed your voter intention during the course of the campaign?
3) If no party can form a stable coalition or get an overall majority would you want a second election later in the year?
The results, from 2,162 respondents:
1) 88% Yes, 7% No, 4% Won’t vote.
2) 24% Yes, 72% No, 3% Won’t vote. (I guess that 1% of respondents changed their minds between Q1 and Q2!)
3) 61% Yes, 26% No, 12% Don’t know.
We’ll see
Five days ago, I made an election prediction, that we would see a small Tory majority.
Given what the polls are saying, that might seem more than a little rash, given also that the polls usually get more or less right.
But as Sky News keep saying, this is an election unlike any other. In 2010, the two-party system became three, and today it appears to have become five, maybe even five and a quarter if you add the Green element. This has come about because of the absence of a credible leader in any party other than the SNP, which contests less than one tenth of the 650 seats.
Five years ago, David Cameron became Prime Minister because the voters disliked him less than they disliked Gordon Brown, old Captain Barbossa, as I will never tire of calling him. The electorate couldn’t bring itself to give him outright power, so it hung a millstone round its neck in the form of the Lib Dems, the greatest argument against televised leadership debates that any country has yet put forward.
Today nothing much has changed. Cameron has made no friends, but fewer enemies than might have been expected. Miliband is the least likeable Labour leader that I can recall, and his personal approval ratings prove it. Clegg is a hollow man who will only keep his seat, if he does, because of Tory tactical voting. Of the newcomers Farage is a bumbling caricature of an English nationalist geezer, not that far apart in philosophy from the BNP, and Natalie Bennett of the Greens is so unimpressive that her party is thinking of changing its name to the Greys.
Then there’s Nicola Sturgeon, of the SNP, whose moment this most certainly is. She has been far and away the most impressive leader of this campaign, and yet even she is on a hiding to nothing. The media and the pollsters are predicting over fifty SNP members of the new Westminster parliament. George Kerevan has my postal vote already in East Lothian, where I expect him to be elected. If he has more than twenty-nine parliamentary colleagues on Friday, I will be pleased and surprised, but anything less than those fifty seats will be portrayed as a failure by Sturgeon by the same media who have been building her up.
But let’s forget Scotland for a while and look south. There the polls show Labour with less than one third of popular support, where one would expect them to be after five years of ineffectual opposition under an unloved leader. The Tories are not doing much better, with a lead of around three per cent at best. The unknown quantity in England is UKIP, which scores around 15%, way ahead of Clegg’s Lib Dems, who could be heading back to the Grimond days of half dozen MPs.
There is no groundswell that will sweep Miliband into Downing Street. The electorate doesn’t want him. But does it want another coalition, or a completely unpredictable nature?
The outcome will depend on how many of those people who have declared for UKIP to the pollsters, can actually bring themselves to cast their vote for Farage and his Band of Idiots, whose raison d’être is undercut by Cameron’s pledge of an In-Out EU referendum. Will one in six out of every English voters do that? I don’t believe they will.
Monty Python
I’ve just had an email from a young lady named Natalia. She’s asking how I’m getting along, and other things besides. In the immortal words of the mortal Willie Ballantine, it’s nice to know I haven’t lost my touch.
Age concern
If you get to the stage in life when your driving licence has to be renewed, and you have a notifiable condition, for example a cardiac pacemaker, do not leave your application to the last minute, instead use all of the 90-day window. If it winds up in the hands of the DVLA medical team, and most probably it will, they will take six weeks to process it, and during that time your driving status will be uncertain. Should you need to hire a car during that period, forget it, for you won’t have a licence. The old one has to be sent in with the application.
Plugged in
My dad took little notice of music; it got in the way of his reading. I doubt that he’d have liked ‘Wilder Mind’, the third Mumford and Sons album. But I do; it reminds me of the time when the younger Dylan caused outrage among his folkie following by going on stage with an electric backing band. i doubt that we’ll see such fury this time round.
My old man
Thirty-nine years ago today, my dad died, suddenly in his armchair, leaving my kids and me with good memories that have been with us ever since. He was reading the Glasgow Herald at the time, but I’ve never held it against that newspaper. At least it wasn’t the Scotsman. (He’d have laughed at that observation, by the way.) He was laughing the last time I saw him, as he showed me to the door, and so was I; about what I can’t remember, but I’ve always felt good about it.
The old dragon
Sky News, obsessed as it is by the betting on the name of the Royal child, advise us that the odds against her being named after Daenerys, ‘The unburnt, Mother of Dragons’, in Game of Thrones, are no less than 500-1. Interestingly, these are the same as those against her being named Camilla.
Kismet
This is the 18th anniversary of the saddest day of my life. I marked it by stopping for a coffee in Riells, where I sat at a table, the only one free in the cafe, next to a couple around my own age. It took me only a couple seconds to recognise them as Toni and RoseMari, from Blagnac, France, neighbours, and friends, from our very first apartment here in L’Escala.
Uncanny that we should meet today, of all days, to bring back some happy memories.
What to do
I’ve made a strange discovery. I’m supposed to be taking a break, but I’ve forgotten how to do that. I needn’t worry, though; Eileen has several ideas for passing my time.
In the midst . . .
The blog sends its sympathy and condolences to the family of Ruth Rendell, and most poignantly, to Rio Ferdinand and his children.
Who the **** is . . .
A few hours ago, just before 9am BST, the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to her second child, a daughter.
A couple of hours later, an email hit my inbox: it was from Marks & Spencer. The heading was ‘The Royal Baby has arrived!’ and the message read ‘Shop M&S Baby!’ On principle, I don’t think I will.
That was crass, but no more so than Sky News’ coverage in the hour or so before the birth was announced.
It was fronted by Kay Burley, appearing bravely at around 8am on a Saturday without access to the make-up department. With nothing really to say, the old pro improvised by dragging Sky’s hapless royal-watcher around the assembling media circus. They paused beside the Ladbrokes blackboard, and its custodian, who told us in all seriousness that her employer was no longer taking gender bets but that its odds had been 4-9 in favour of the new arrival being a girl. ‘That means you have to put on £9 to get £4 back,’ she explained, providing living proof that most punters are idiots.
Odds on potential names had been chalked on the board, with ‘Alice’ showing as 6-4 favourite.
Seeing this, I remarked to my wife, ‘Maybe the bookies will be right, but if they’re not . . . could it be down to Roy ‘Chubby Brown?’
She looked at me blankly. ‘Work it out,’ I said. (By the way, I’ll have a £ on ‘Diana’, at 14-1 against, being in there somewhere.)
Moving on from the turf accountant, Kay latched on to the veteran photographer Arthur Edwards. Once he had his little step-ladder in place, she asked him when we could expect the new arrival.
He tilted his head and, even as inside the Lindo Wing Wills was giving one last shout of ‘Push!’, he replied, ‘Oh, we’ll still be here tomorrow.’
As any reporter would tell you, that shows you how much photographers know.
It’s complicated
Roll on May 8. Let it all be over.
I voted last week, by post, hoping to play my part in the eradication of Labour from the ranks of Scottish Westminster MPs. It’s a fate I believe that party has earned, by its performance during the 2014 referendum, and by its shameful treatment of its honest Scottish leader, Johan Lamont, during and after the campaign.
Three posts ago I made a prediction and expressed a hope; I’m about to do the same again.
The prediction: that there will be a small overall Conservative majority, and that the SNP will win a majority of the Scottish seats, but not as many as the wilder polls predict.
The hope: that the Tories win 320 seats, making them the largest single party but short of outright power, with their preferred option being to form a minority Government.
My Prime Minister of choice would be Nicola Sturgeon, but she won’t be an MP. (Not Alex Salmond? No, too divisive.) In her absence, my preference must be for Cameron to carry on (without the Lib Dem millstone) for I don’t believe that Miliband deserves to be Prime Minister. He carries the mark of Cain (if your brother can’t trust you, who else can?) and he’s surrounded by too many of the people who screwed it up last time, including the awful Balls couple, who’ve been kept as far out of the electorate’s sight as possible. (Could that be a tactic on their part, to preserve Yvette as a leadership candidate, post-Ed?)
My hope might cut across Nicola’s expressed determination to keep the Tories out of power, but that statement was made in the context of a powerful campaign against Labour in Scotland. Her first responsibility is to the people of Scotland, and to deliver the best possible post-referendum settlement, and for me that means full fiscal autonomy vested in the Scottish Government. By denouncing the SNP, Miliband has ruled that out should he lead the largest minority party on May 8. Only Cameron can give us what we want, deserve and need.
Taking the vi negre
When I got home from shopping this morning and opened my email, I found a new message from Majestic Wines, telling me about a special offer, a 2009 Reserva Rioja for only £6.99, a reduction on the list price of £10.49, but only if I bought two.
That got my attention; not least because I’d just bought the same product in Spain for the regular ALDI list price of €3.99, or £2.90 at the current rate of exchange.
Okay, duty on wine is a lot higher in the UK than in Spain, but I flat out do not believe that the £4.09 difference in price between the Spanish bottle and the Majestic version . . . or the £7.59 difference if you only buy one . . . is accountable entirely to taxation.
We are being seriously ripped off in Britain by the supermarkets and the wine warehouses. It’s time we made a large fuss about it.
Concentration
The vote for the most surprised man in L’Escala, and maybe all of Spain must go to a tall, bespectacled, skin-headed bloke, pushing his trolley up the aisle in ALDI this morning, when a little blonde woman dumped a dozen eggs and various other items, a whole armful, in there . . . and then looked up.
No, it wasn’t me.
Happy anniversaries
Best wishes from the wife and me, to Ann and Eric on their Golden, and to Frank and Jenny as they approach that number.
The great debate
Okay, I admit it. I’ve been hiding away from the blog for a few weeks. To those who’ve missed me, i apologise. To those who haven’t . . . I hope you enjoyed my absence while it lasted.
Where have I been? Usually, when I disappear it’s because I’m wrapped up in the final stages of a book, or on the road promoting a new publication. That was the case throughout March and for much of April, but Skinner 26 went to my publisher four weeks ago and the ‘Last Resort’ events were pretty much over by April 19.
Since then I’ve been keeping out of the way, in a vain attempt to distance myself from the great debate. I’ve passed TV screens with my hands over my ears and my eyes screwed shut, doing my best to keep it all out, wishing only that the damn thing was over.
But I’ve failed. I can go on no longer without making a prediction, and expressing a hope. So here goes.
The prediction: Floyd Mayweather Jr, an unpleasant little arsehole who’s done time for domestic violence, will win by unanimous decision or possibly by a late stoppage.
The hope: that I’m wrong and that Manny Pacquiao knocks ten bells out of him.
Quintin Jardine's blog 