It is a Saturday. It must be sport for me. Throughout my life a Saturday has meant looking forward to some form of sport and the anticipation of kick-off. From a young lad playing rugby in the morning and football in the afternoon to just about struggling to make Birstall 2nds most weekends. It was the same throughout my time in politics and and as an MP. I think it is why I never fully fitted into the way politics is run. You see for political types Saturday is more canvassing time and political conferences. Don’t get me wrong I did all those things, it is just that like today when there is a big sporting day v a political day the sport usually wins!
Today for sport in Leicester it has been a big day. As most people know Leicester City have been rooted to the bottom of the Premier League for too long. It seems a long time ago that they beat Man Utd 5-3. Whilst we all were encouraged to #keepthefaith I am afraid I did start to doubt about a month ago. And then 3 wins on the bounce and today a six-pointer against Burnley. By now you know the result. 1-0 win to Leicester and we are out of the drop zone. Still there are 5 games to go and it could all go wrong but after this last month we would be stupid not to think it is possible.
As a Tigers fan I have always been disappointed at the football side not quite replicating our success, but this year Tigers have been pretty poor too. It will take a separate blog to outline all the reason, but once again like the Foxes it was still possible for Tigers to make the play-off top four if they kept winning. Today it was up against poor old London Welsh and Tigers were already talking about the bonus point before the game. They did it. They got the win and bonus point. I can’t see us doing that well even if we do progress to the final 4.
All of this is a distraction from the main points from the election campaign today and illustrates the inability some days to ‘cut-through’. Some days you just have to hope the non sporting population (of which there are millions) are not shopping and paying some attention to the news.
Given that there is lots of other real news and the election seems to have been going for ever it is no surprise that most of what I have seen has been about the earthquake in Nepal.
But politically I have been following the excellent www.may2015.com polling and logs which as far as I can see give the most accurate and best appraisal of all the commentaries. In particular this one is worth a read.
This is how Ed Miliband get to 323 seats and becomes Prime Minister
The other news from the FT is the way Nick Clegg seems to have chosen to paint himself into the Blue corner again for post election discussions.
Of course Nick Clegg is ostensibly a Tory anyway and this is where he feels most comfortable. But I suspect there will be many of his MPs and many in the Party who thought they were a left of centre party and the idea of propping up a Tory, UKIP, DUP coalition is far from ideal. There are some tactics being played here as many Lib Dems will be losing their seats to the Tories in the SW but in other parts of the country where they pretend to be leaning further to the left of Labour this announcement won’t have pleased them. Vote Lib Dem and get another Tory government isn’t a great sell in Leeds or Manchester where a couple of LD friends are defending slim majorities.
Finally as it is sport v politics I couldn’t help laugh at the sporting slip from Cameron – who seems to have forgotten he is a die hard Aston Villa fan, but telling everybody to back his ‘West Ham’ As Jonathan Ashworth wryly commented on twitter as the Foxes beat Burnley – perhaps being confused by the colour of the kit again & the PM will be crying at another loss for his beloved team.
View from the Margins 