Winds of change are forever blowing at Sir Keir’s doorstep
WE ARE all being assailed by some real stinkers this summer. Questions that are real killers to answer. Top of the ranking must be: do you agree with the policies of Keir Starmer?
Do you mean the ones he announced this morning or the different ones of yesterday? Or maybe those he was announcing last week – before he changed them?
After professing the voice of the majority of the British over Brexit was the democratic way of doing things, he has now decided it was all wrong and Brussels is the way to go. Now he will hear the opposite view and agree to change his mind. I’ve heard of flexible politics but his make knicker elastic fit for bungee jumping.
He must just hope that come the election people want a Sorbo rubber ball in Downing Street.
■ AS THE fourth and, for England, crucial Test gets underway, the dispute over the legality of the stumping of Jonny Bairstow in the second rumbles on and on. For cricket nuts it will enter into legend and remain unresolved. (Those bored by cricket must forgive me here. We are a nation of nutters.)
Bairstow clearly thought the over was finished and the ball dead when he began his too-early ramble up the wicket. England fans insist his stumping, which could have lost us the whole Test if he had gone on to score a matchsaving century, may have been technically legal but was not within “the spirit of cricket” and the Australians should sportingly have declined it.
But the umpires gave their verdict. It was a legitimate stumping. Surely to dispute the umpires is well outside the spirit of cricket? That is what they are employed for; to adjudicate.
Let’s hope we can clinch the Fourth, next week, and maybe make history by nabbing the Fifth and regaining the Ashes.
As for Wimbledon, I’m sorry but all our hopes were wiped out so early that I lost interest and switched to the Third Day triumph at Lord’s.
■ IN HIS first major public comments since standing down as chairman of the BBC (and thus safe from having to do anything about it), Richard Sharp has suggested the flat-rate, across-theboard fee levied by the BBC on all with a TV set is unfair.
Well, surprise, surprise; and the sun rises in the east. Of course the universal confiscation is unfair. It particularly savages the old, frail, infirm and solitary, for whom their TV set is the only companion.
Never mind if they don’t ever watch BBC. They are the most likely of all social groups to be very hard put to afford that fee. There used to be an exemption for the over-75s but that was abolished while our bone-idle government tut-tutted and went back to feuding – the only pastime of which they never tire.