Balls-Out Attack

A spat has developed between Ed Balls and Fraser Nelson of the Spectator. Many might find it astonishingly boring and un-newsworthy, but not me. It started here and then really got going here.

It tells us the following:

1. Balls is in on the bare-faced lie idea with Brown. Darling is clearly not, and is most uncomfortable with this whole charade. But Ed is still indistinguishable from Brown.

2. Balls monitors the blogs, and calls up the authors. He has time for all this, whilst putting out the fires in his own ministry and attending inner-cabal meetings at Number 10. FOUR calls chasing the Editor of the Speccie! This man is a Cabinet Minister. Jeeesus.

3. For a clever man, Balls is prepared to go to astonishing lengths of intellectual dishonesty. His attempt to weasel his way out of the 'lie' charge by claiming he was discussing debt ratios, and then accusing the clear-speaking Nelson of being 'economically illiterate', is beneath contempt.

Bragging Rights

Because everyone thought that the ball would beat the fieldsman easily and go for four, no one had their camera ready. Okay, there weren't any proper cameramen there, but there should have been.

The batsman from the Greater Lurgashall XI had slashed at a quick ball of full length outside off stump, and had got a thick outside edge on it; instead of disappearing to the backward point boundary, it gave the very slightest encouragement to the fielder at third man. That fielder being Idle, you understand.

Showing startling acceleration for a fourteen stone lad not far short of 50, your correspondent headed along the boundary, reckoning that the further the ball had to travel, the greater the (outside) chance of intercepting it. The ball had never gained very much height, but was still comfortably airborne, and what had started as an attempt to field the leather orb suddenly became, at best, a 100-1 shot of catching it.

It has become an irritating custom in the modern-day game for someone to shout "catch it!" when the ball leaves the bat and does not immediately go to ground. However, idle plays his cricket with a) gentlemen; and b) people who do not expect their colleagues to pull off feats of athleticism in the field. So instead there was silence, even from the large crowd of WAGs and children. They all thought it a lost cause, maybe a six, probably a four.

What happened next? you ask; I shall tell you. Somehow, instinctively, idle turned a thundering, vertical rotund frame into a graceful horizontal one. The closest picture I can find on google images is the one posted above, who is a nameless Kiwi. I do not actually remember getting off the deck, indeed I am surprised that there was any muscle memory in the idle chassis capable of creating such a manoeuvre.

I did not see the last two feet of travel of the ball into my right palm, but it hit the sweet spot perfectly, and stuck true. The reconnection of the idle torso and terra firma might easily have caused dislodgement, let alone a small earth tremor in the Rother Valley, but I landed comfortably, despite the sun-baked turf and the velocity of the episode. I lay there, quite still, for a second, but cocked my wrist upwards to signal the completion of the catch.

A roar went up and the three nearest members of the Greater Milland XI started sprinting towards me uttering banshee noises, with every intention, it seemed to me, of knocking me to the ground and burying me, not unlike those who play that most loathsome of sports, soccer. So I did the intelligent thing and sped off around the boundary. Luckily I was moving away from the crowd at the pavilion, or it might have looked like an immodest victory lap. Eventually I jettisoned the ball towards the wickie and accepted the high-fives and manly claps-around-the-shoulders of my teammates, who had calmed down very slightly. All present declared it the finest and most unlikely catch they could remember seeing in a match.

There are two golden rules in ballgames: first, keep your eye on the ball; second, never give up. This, it seems to me, is a metaphor for life itself. I shall apply it to my employment situation, and beome idle no more.

Except for this blog, of course.

Random

1. A "Rock Dinosaur" is a musician who was very good (or very well known) at least thirty years ago, and who still can do the business now on a big enough stage. It helps if you look like a dinosaur, in the manner of a Keith Richards or an Alice Cooper.

I watched the great Neil Young's gig at Glastonbury last night, and it strikes me that he is now the equal of Keef on dinosaur looks. And the endless Keep on Rocking in the Free World (I think there were 5 fake endings, each time suddenly bursting into another raucus chorus), was just fab. I'm sorry I'm not going to see him live this summer. I walked the idle dog to After the Gold Rush this morning. Pleasure.

2. Guido flags up yet another Gordon-plays-Father-Christmas lunacy. Read Delingpole's piece on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill going through Congress as well. Completely fucking batty. I had a long chat with a member of Parliament yesterday, and I asked him if he had ever seen Gordon behaving in a normal manner privately. He said not; he said the impression the public has of Brown is as close to the real thing as it is possible to get. Remember that the next time JK Rowling tells you he is the life and soul of the party and a kind sensitive loving type behind the 'unfair' media image.

3. Teenage sporting hero and shagger extraordinaire Boris Becker was giving his thoughts to the adoring spinster Sue Barker on the telly just now. It struck me, not just what a nice chap he is (I have long thought so), but that he might be my favourite German. Or am I overlooking some other candidates? Surely there is a long list of boxheads, sausage-noshers, Boche and krauts that spring to mind. Who else might qualify?

While you ponder Neil Young, imminent global disaster and Boris' fellow Germans, I am off to play cricket in this Mediterranean heat.

Ebony and Ivory

So, farewell then, Michael Jackson

"Don't stop 'til you get enough", you sang

The rest of us were shouting "Enough!" years ago

But you obviously didn't hear us

Freedom

Freedom to practice your religion the way the mullahs say you should? Or freedom to feel the sun on your face and the breeze on your body? It's a tricky one, isn't it?

No it isn't. There are plenty enough countries in the world where medieval attitudes persist, and folk who want to emigrate there can go right ahead. Western Europe has its liberties to protect, and when the waters are muddied by the age-old religious freedoms debate, it is ALWAYS right to come down on the side of the individual rather than an institution or group.

Sarkozy is right to ban the burqa, and James Delingpole is right to compare Sarkozy's attitude to the wishy washy liberal guff of Obama. Delingpole fires from the hip:

Almost every idea that ever came out of France has been bad for America, from the structuralist philosophical gibberish which has poisoned US academe to the grotesquely over-regulated tax and spend socialism which is now ruining the US economy. But if there’s one area where the French do get it SO right it’s in their uncompromising approach to Islam.

President Sarkozy once again showed the way yesterday when in a presidential address to France’s two houses of parliament, he said the burqa is not welcome in his country and should be banned.

As he rightly went on to say the full-body garment which makes women in Afghanistan look like a cross between a prison cell and a walking tent is “not a sign of religion” but a “sign of subservience.” He added: “We cannot have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social ife, deprived of identity.”

Compare and contrast, the appalling cultural appeasement of President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4 when he boasted that the United States prized freedom of religion and would not “tell people what to wear.” And there was I thinking it was the French who were supposed to be the surrender monkeys, not the Americans.

Was there ever greater proof that, where the great clash of civilisations is concerned, President Obama is turning out to be the Islamists’ useful idiot par excellence?

Does Barack Hussein Obama really not understand that supposed “freedom” he is granting US Muslim women to wear the veil is in fact the most surefire way of guaranteeing their continued subservience to their men folk and their failure to integrate with the broader society?

A Berk Who Will Not Be Cowed

Heaven knows one shouldn't criticise a politician for being ambitious. But when Steve Richards said on the news just now that he had taken a call from John Bercow immediately after the 2005 election, asking for a meeting somewhere private, where he advised Richards that he wished to become Speaker, it became clear that Bercow's re-election as the member for Buckingham was not about representing his constituents at Westminster so much as representing himself on the greasy pole towards High Office.

You may say that the Speakership does not represent High Office, but an antique position of no real power; you may say that no one ever got to the Speaker's chair without planning and preparation; you may say that he is an improvement on the last Speaker. Nevertheless, his performance this evening, from the moment when, sat all agape on the Tory benches, he learned of his victory, to his poor, halting, somewhat smug and patronising victory speech, he struck me as less than credible. He speaks poorly, which is only forgivable if what is said is worthwhile - rather, he seemed clichéd and shallow.

The length of Bercow's first term is in the gift of Mandelson - when he withdraws support for Brown, an election will surely follow quickly. Bercow has until that election to convince Tories that he is worth his place, won as it was with the vote of the rump of the Labour party. But his Tory colleagues see him for what he is, which is a schemer and a greaser, and it is likely that the swathe of incoming Tory MPs at the next election will be broadly of like mind.

I decided against illustrating this post with a picture of the man.

It's Gotta Be Widders

She may have the most annoying voice in Westminster (well, second perhaps, after Patricia Hewitt); she may have the dress sense of a Bulgarian; she may have the body of an East German saloon car and a set of teeth like a cemetery; she may even have bigotted views on hunting and rural pest control, but she is idle's choice for Speaker.

Why? Because she promises to resign at the next general election.

There is no public confidence in this Parliament, and rightly so. Many are retiring next year, many have been forced to go, and many more will be chucked out, having been found out as worthless, dishonest also-rans in a discredited ruling party. These are not the people to elect a new Speaker who may be in the chair for fifteen or twenty years.

So it's time to hold one's nose and vote Widders.

UPDATE 10.39: "Tories threaten to expel new Speaker after election" Political Editor of Evening Standard. They are worried that it's Beckett or Bercow. Well, you know to avoid such a situation.....

UPDATE 2 18.55 Well, it won't be Widders; My guess is that Young beats Bercow by a narrow margin, and we are spared the awful little greaser camping it up in uniform. Will Sir George Young, who strikes me as a Whig, if elected, restore the wig to the Speaker's head?