The week Lady Di became a Princess, I was mountaineering in the Pyrenees with a group of kids who were mostly blind, or going blind fast. These tall fellows serve up an ace, then another, then it’s game, set and match to love before you’re half-way through your first punnet of strawberries Oh, I remember, when it was played as it should be Fred Perry, he bestrode the Centre Court like a colossus And Ginnie Wade, lovely gel, simply lovely.. Well, if we can’t grind out an honourable draw there’s always the chance of rain spoiling their chance of another hat trick.And failing that, there is Wimbledon But that’s gone the same way. I’ve had a good innings but if this is how the game is to be played I say we might as well up stumps and go home. It’s just not cricket when they bowl so fast that all you can do is grit your teeth and try to play a straight bat Then when we bowl at them we get knocked for six. If I wasn’t prepared to name a ballpark figure, he said, he’d assume I’d struck out, but never mind, he’d take a raincheck. No idea what he was going on about.
Still, the Test match starts tomorrow, though we always seem to be on a bit of a sticky wicket with these West Indians.
When I asked him what on earth he meant he said was I ready to step up to the plate or was I some kind of a switch hitter? Well, really. I was at a board meeting last week and this chappie said it was time to play hardball. I’m not saying they play dirty but they’ve moved the goalposts and don’t understand the meaning of fair play. As for the Americans, well at least they had the decency to invent their own silly games.
They may have sold us a few dummies but the truth is they just don’t play the game. You take your eye off the ball and here they come, a few flying tackles and they’ve won the grand slam leaving us looking like a sorry bunch of dropkicks. They say we’re no match for them, that we have no game plan, but let me kick that idea into touch. It’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game that counts. But you trying telling that to these colonial chappies Maoris, Tongans, Samoans – brushing England’s manhood aside like flies from their afternoon tea. We’re not in their league, the papers say, outplayed at every step. Where is Roy Jenkins’s “the permissive society is the civilised society”? On policy, some old social democrats say Blair isn’t tough or brave enough, retreating rapidly on constitutional reform, failing to lay out a radical enough portfolio on which he would then have the mandate to act.On the other hand, unlike us, this child of ours looks as if he is going to win..
On the old tough and tender scale, Blair is too tough on law and order and liberal issues, less progressive, his tone on “family” and “community” nudging closer to Christian Democracy. One senses a number of these ex-SDP Lib Dems feel uncomfortably stranded for historical reasons of their own making in a no-hope third party, when their natural Labour homeland is beckoning them back from exile.So is Blair’s party the SDP arisen from its grave? Yes and no. Bill Rodgers, Lib Dem home affairs spokesman in the Lords, is outspoken in his admiration for Tony Blair, who he says has gone even further in the right direction than we did. However, a group of ex-SDP Lib Dems are considering returning to Labour, held back only by anxiety that undermining the Lib Dems will prevent them winning the seats Labour needs them to win to keep the Tories out. (Ah, if only he and Ian Gilmour had dared, history might have been different!)The leaders of the merger faction have, of course, stayed with the Lib Dems.