GOOD SPORTS

My excellent 1950s public school in Edinburgh was rather too enthusiastic about rugby in my time (I suppose it now teaches the French horn, interracial studies and plays a gender-inclusive version of lacrosse) and one of the joys of then going up to Oxford was the revelation that playing games was no longer mandatory nor even expected. No more wearisome scrums, no more communal showers and no more mud-bespattered hair – ah bliss! I was not some shrinking nerd but I soon enough concentrated on darts and shove-ha’penny, agreeable indoor recreations well sheltered from the North Wind and usually accompanied by a convivial pint or three of ale.

I wonder how our beloved leaders exercise when they are not haranguing the luckless electorate. We know that Boris rides a bike, a quasi-suicidal activity in central London, but I have to say his generous embonpoint probably prevents him from enjoying many streamlining benefits; the comfort of his ministerial Jag more becomes him. Michael Gove is a jogger and is often caught gasping like a gaffed salmon as he finally returns to the haven of his front door. What Jacob Rees-Mogg gets up to I can only speculate – I see him practising a spidery entrechat at the barre – whatever, his equable temper is its own reward.

Boris on his bike

Gove running for office

Jeremy Corbyn is not a team player and is, or certainly was, a keen cyclist too. In the 1960s he was to be encountered, all knobbly-knee’d and bicycle-clipped, touring the empty roads of East Germany admiring Ulbricht’s workers’ paradise. Unaccountably those workers were continually trying to escape to the West – not a journey contemplated in Jeremy’s Marxist handbook. Jo Swinson is a sociable type probably into synchronized swimming – her entire party can join her - while Nicola Sturgeon perhaps favours haggis-hurling, as long as she can blame England for any of her shortcomings.

Jeremy mounts his (red) bike

Widening the net, I suppose golf is a typical exercise for the laid-back leaders of men. Its image as a sport is besieged at present as its most ardent protagonist is none other than President Donald Trump. Is The Donald entirely to be trusted, will his conduct of foreign policy by tweet become the new norm and will impeachment proceedings enliven 2020? He will need the best shots in his locker to dodge these difficulties and achieve re-election next November, but we have seen this peculiar phoenix rise from the ashes several times already.

Trump drives on regardless

    

Closer to home, another golfer with a precarious grip on reality is our Prince Andrew, clouded and eclipsed by sordid scandal and perhaps to be exiled forever from the splendours of Windsor and Buck House. He has made a complete Horlicks of his position and deeply embarrassed our revered Queen.

Andrew stuck in the rough for good

The man in the news as I write is Emmanuel Macron quarrelling with Trump, Brussels and now beset by so-called ouvriers complaining about their amazingly generous, but clearly unaffordable, state- underwritten pension schemes. Mind you, if I were an ouvrier I would certainly defend these valuable “rights” – I am probably just sick with envy as I contemplate the UK’s feeble state pension. I do not believe Macron participates in any sport but I see this proud stony-faced figure drawn in a lavish carriage with liveried outriders, waving a gloved and bejewelled hand at a despised mob of Jacobins and gilets jaunes. Apparently even his cherished wife Brigitte finds Macron “arrogant” – quite an accolade from a people noted for their arrogance from Louis XIV through Napoleon to Charles de Gaulle.

Brigitte and "arrogant" Emmanuel Macron

                                 

My final sad sportsman is Sir John Major, successor to Thatcher and hitherto well-regarded retired Premier. The convention is that ex-Prime Ministers avoid partisan politics but yesterday Major advised the electors to support Tory Remain rebels, most of whom have been expelled from the Party he once led. This disloyalty sticks in the craw and while Major loved cricket in his idyllic (and disappeared) Huntingdonshire, I hope he is tied in further knots by an unplayable googly or that the ghost of splendid Bob Willis shatters his wicket with a jet-powered Yorker.

SMD

07.12.19

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2019