Ed Miliband and the art of Swing

Over the years many analogies have been made about cricket and politics. Sometimes it got so confusing that Zimbabwe picked a player called Alistair Campbell. It may have been no coincidence that the glory days of Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan happened to run alongside the might of New Labour its pomp. Spin all round.

But I was in the pub - like an ITV panel discussion but without a picture of London behind us - and repeated Laboury types were expressing their disappointment that Ed Miliband was yet to knock David Cameron over with the sheer force of his personality and political brilliance. There were even comments about how Ed might be Labour's Hague or - worse - IDS.

I understand the concern - here we are in the grip of a major political crisis. The state is being dismantled. Jobless numbers are rising and likely to rocket in the New Year. The children of Pink Floyd guitarists are setting fire to Winston Churchill. Why, they scream, is no-one holding David Cameron to account?

But it's this very crisis that is making them impatient. Thanks to the coalition's ability to stitch things up - see this more open-minded take - it's almost certain that we will have to wait 5 years before a general election. The coalition may last the ride or it may not, but an election is a long way off. That's 5 years of this shit: it makes people afraid, desperate and, naturally, disinclined to play the long game that they will nevertheless be forced to play.

But this is where the cricket analogy creeps back in. For 5 years read 5 days. The length and subtlety of test cricket makes it so much better a source of metaphor than quicker sports.

The Conservatives are at the crease. It is their job to to reach their goals, score policy objectives and enhance personal reputations. The coalition aspect makes this team prone to batting collapses, but they have some seriously good stroke makers.

The Labour party have the ball in their hand. It is their job to *stop* the Conservatives building their innings.

Every team needs a fast bowler, someone who can dominate through sheer physicality and force of personality, shake up the best players and remove the weaker ones. Tony Blair was like Malcolm Marshall or Curtly Ambrose - terrifyingly good, able to get the best of batsmen on any surface. Understandably, Labour are pining for someone of his stature, just as the West Windies are.

But just as the big question mark over, say, Glenn McGrath's stature as a great bowler is that he never had to bowl at the great Australian side of the 2000s, so Labour supporters tend to forget that Blair was bowling at rabbits. Brown, who never led in opposition and was therefore a batsman in this analogy, was a fine player with only slightly suspect technique, and the fact that Cameron took him down with relative ease suggests that the Tories too believed they had found a wicket taking leader of the attack.

But he's batting now, and this is where things get complicated. Because Cameron is like nothing Labour have faced since the 1980s. He's a bit good. Some batsmen are very good at facing down fast bowlers. Heads drop, the ball goes a bit soft, and there are runs a plenty for the taking. Fast bowlers are one trick ponies - if they can't blast you out, they don't have very much else to throw at you.

When this happens a cricket team changes its strategy. If you're too good to be got out, they reason, they will test your patience, the soundness of your technique. Bowlers like Matthew Hoggard and James Anderson lack the glamour of Andrew Flintoff or Brett Lee, but they win games when on song. A patient batsman can survive their wiles if he is sure of himself. But what do is what cricketers call "asking questions": they will put the ball in places where the batsman feels they can hit it, but because of their subtlety there is always the risk that the delivery is not what it seems. Batsmen fall for traps, respond aggressively when patience would win the game. In short, they get themselves out.

Miliband's performances at PMQs have thus far seemed more Terry Alderman than Dennis Lillee. He will never be the man to take the new ball and blast Cameron's stumps apart. But Cameron is too good a player to be intimated by anything other than the best, and Labour do not have anyone of that calibre. What Miliband is doing is patiently undermining Cameron's technique, floating the ball up to him and allowing Cameron to make mistakes. And make them he does. His overly aggressive "outrage" mode that he developed to cope with Brown's clunking front foot shots served him well as a bowler, but now he's at the crease he runs the risk of hitting the ball in the air or missing it all together.

It's a flat wicket. The Tories will pile on the runs whatever happens. But if Miliband can continue to facelessly undermine the foundations of Cameron's batting then they might not bat us out of sight. With protests on the street and anger in the air, the ball may start swinging, and the Tories may just start the process of getting themselves out. But only if Labour are more patient than them and don't get tempted to chop and change the bowling too much.

The Right to Mediocrity

Just noticing Nick Clegg's defence in the Commons of his party's acquiescence over tuition fees.

On justifying the turn around from April (when he called a potential rise to £7,000 "a disaster"), Nicky boy trotted out the old cliche:

"We have stuck to our ambition to make sure that going to university is done in a progressive way so that those people who are presently discouraged from going to university – bright people from poor backgrounds, discouraged by the system we inherited from her [Harman's] government – are able to do so. That is why our policy is more progressive than hers."

Without wishing to suggest that Labour had a particularly good policy on HE, if I hear one more over educated rich boy say that they're working towards making sure "bright people from poor backgrounds" can go to university, whilst intellectual lightweights like Clegg himself can stroll in without a thought I might scream. Like the fight for women's equality, where women often had to be better than their male counterparts to get or hold down the same job, poor students have to be 50% cleverer than the average before anyone cares. In an intellect-for-intellect match up, legions of dizzy fuckwits from the middle and upper classes are sitting in seminar rooms and lecture theatres around the country, whilst people who are their intellectual equals or even superiors (but not by *quite* enough) are struggling to work out what they're going to do at 18 now all the jobs have dried up.

If we're serious about separating the fate of young people from the economic success (or failure) of their parents, then completely ordinary minds from poor backgrounds should be getting a university education too, so that maybe one day they can be Deputy Prime Minister.