Monday
And so it was over. You normally get a bit more notice when a prime minister is about to deliver their resignation speech outside No 10. The buildup. The sense of occasion. Keir Starmer did things differently.
No sooner had “Hot Podium Guy” set up the lectern in Downing Street than Keir was out the front door. As if he couldn’t wait for it all to be over. His speech was done in little more than five minutes.
There was no David Cameron confected nonchalance. No tears as there were with Theresa May. No unconcealed bitterness and resentment like Boris Johnson. No bewilderment at the speed of the ending like Liz Truss. And no symbolic rainstorm as with Rish Sunak.
Keir said he was going with good grace and he looked as though he meant it. He may still feel angry at the way some of his cabinet turned on him, but it was no longer consuming his every waking minute. What was done was done. He would miss the attention but could see the upside of no longer being the bloke who got woken up at 4am to be told of Donald Trump’s latest efforts to start world war three.
Despite the rapid turnover of prime ministers in the last 10 years, there is still something quite poignant about these moments. To see the very public end of a frontline political career. Keir did his best to cement his legacy by saying he had left the country in a better place than he had found it. Which was probably true. He just hadn’t changed the country enough. Or given us a reason to believe in him. And now it was like watching him being airbrushed out of history.
From now on, anything that goes wrong for Andy will be Keir’s fault. And anything that goes right, Andy will take the credit for. It was always thus.
Tuesday
We’re going to have to reset the clock. Coming in to the World Cup, all the talk was of ending “60 years of hurt”. Now we’re going to have to up that to “64 years of hurt” for the next tournament in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. I feel like I really should know better, but this time round I did allow myself to believe that this might be the year when we got to the final and maybe even win it.
A team that seemed to be able to play as a team and a manager with the nous to be able to find a way to win matches that we appeared to be losing. Then came the Argentina semi-final. It was like watching Spurs again. Mind you, I knew the game was up when we took the lead. It was far too early in the second half. Far too much time to think about all the ways they could screw it up.
The only way we were ever going to win that game was to keep the score at 0-0 until injury time and then go for the winner. Whose idea it was to try and defend for the last 40 minutes is still not clear.
I was just screaming at the TV for England to carry on playing in the way that had got them the lead and had kept Lionel Messi relatively quiet. Desperate for someone on the pitch to realise that another way to have won the game was to score a second goal.
Still, we did get to participate in the most entertaining match of the whole World Cup when we took on France in the third-place play-off. Not that we should read too much into the 6-4 scoreline other than that it was a joy to watch what was basically a friendly between two teams that were demob happy. And we did get to miss out on Trump making a fool of himself by trying to gatecrash the celebrations. Swings and roundabouts.
Wednesday
This time last year, Reform was setting the political agenda. While Labour and the Tories seemed to have shut up shop, having decided the public must have been as fed up with politics as they were, Nigel Farage and Co were dominating the headlines with new policy announcements every week. Now it seems that the two main parties are trying not to make the same mistake again.
Andy Burnham’s government is dripping us a new policy every day while Kemi Badenoch has become desperate to get television airtime at every opportunity. The latest is to tell us that she doesn’t really trust Andy. Who would have guessed?
As for Reform, it appears to have stalled somewhat. From leading the polls it now finds itself neck-and-neck with Labour in many samples and it feels more and more as if Nige can’t stand the level of scrutiny he is coming under with regard to his own finances. Ever since the Guardian revealed he had received a £5m gift from the Thai crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nige has rather gone to ground. Refusing to do regular press conferences, taking no questions from the media and reduced to posting videos on social media from the middle of random fields. Moreover, his financial affairs are becoming more opaque the more he tries to explain them. First the £5m was to pay for his security, then a gift. Now it is alleged it was a downpayment on his demand for £1m a year to stand as an MP for Clacton. All this before we get to the donations both in kind and cash from the convicted fraudster George Cottrell and his mum, Fiona. It’s not very Man of the People.
Also, despite protestations to the contrary, it becomes more and more clear that Reform is really a one-man band. Dicky Tice is a halfwit, Robert Jenrick a liability and Zia Yusuf so dislikable that even Reform constituency associations don’t want him to stand as their MP. All of which seems to be getting to Nige. This week he turned up at a rally – if you can call it that – in Norfolk and appeared as bored as the 200 people in the audience. Just a rehash of some of his favourite lines that we’ve all heard before. Nothing new to say. Just a need for some attention. And no questions from anyone. He’s desperate for all the talk about his finances to go away but the more he deflects, the greater the interest. The Reform bubble might just be bursting.
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Thursday
Regular readers of this column will have realised that I was away two weeks ago while visiting my daughter in Minneapolis. At least that was the plan. But a couple of days before we were due to fly, my wife tripped on an uneven pavement and broke her shoulder. So we had to stay at home. Chemo can make the bones more brittle, so that’s another thing to blame cancer for.
The charge sheet gets ever longer. It was meant as a short trip – I was going for four days, my wife for eight – but I was still gutted. This was the second trip to the US we have had to cancel in the past year and we are yet to see Anna’s new house – she moved in the middle of last year – or to meet her new dog, Pearl.
I have also yet to discover whether I will actually be allowed into the US or if I will be put on the first return flight home. Fingers crossed that border security have better things to do than read satirical sketches about the president in the Guardian. We are now planning/hoping/not counting our chickens that we can get to Minnesota for Christmas. So I guess I will find out then. Maybe Trump will still be too moany about the mid-term election results to bother with the odd UK journalist.
Talking of dogs, we have also had a massive disappointment. We had made it down to the last two to rehome a six year-old cockapoo called Tinka whose owner had died unexpectedly. We did get to meet Tinka once and take her for a walk. She was very different to Herbie, much more nervy and insecure. But we had fallen in love with her on the spot and had dared to look forward to making her a part of our lives. But it was not to be.
So the hunt goes on. If any of you knows of a house-trained cockapoo that is in need of a home or even a cockapoo puppy that nobody wants, then please do get in touch. We are both feeling very much dog deprived. The last year has been unremittingly shit. We are due a break.
Friday
Maybe it was the excitement of the third place play-off and the buildup to the World Cup final. Maybe it’s just that the UK no longer cares that much about athletics. The Commonwealth Games start today and they barely register on the public consciousness.
Ticket sales are sluggish and they aren’t even being broadcast on terrestrial TV. When I was young they were almost as big a deal as the Olympics. Probably because it was the one Games back then when we won a shedload of medals.
But even so, I can’t help feeling that Josh Kerr hasn’t got quite the credit he deserves for breaking the world record for the mile at the London Stadium last Saturday. A remarkable achievement by any standard, but all the more so because he beat the record set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999 by nearly half a second. A breathtaking piece of running that had been more than a year in the planning. Kerr had dedicated his whole season – he called it Project 222 because that’s the precise number of seconds he needed to run to finish in 3.42 – to this one race.
From March this year, he was telling the world what he planned to do. The time and place he would achieve sporting immortality. And yet … While most papers covered the world record on the night, Kerr seems to have rather slipped out of the British public’s mind since. As if, everyone was thinking, “That’s nice” before forgetting about it.
The US media seem far more impressed, with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times both having written in-depth analysis of how Kerr did it. All very different from the late 70s and early 80s when Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe were regularly swapping the mile record. Back then almost everyone had a favourite – mine was Ovett; I found Coe unbearably smug. Still do, in fact – and their races didn’t just lead the sports pages, they made front-page news as well.
They were both personalities as well as athletics greats. Instantly recognisable. Josh Kerr could walk into a pub and there’s a fair chance no one would know who he was. So let’s hear it for Josh. I’m biased, of course. I used to run myself. Though my best 10K time was 10 minutes outside the world record. Call this the start of a campaign for Josh to win this year’s sports personality of the year. Let’s face it. No other athlete is going to come close to achieving what he has.
