This week the World Cup thrummed up through the gears and began to rev and judder and grind at the clutch. Last night the draw for South Africa took place, featuring a sweating man in a Fifa blazer, a beautifully groomed flaxen‑haired Hollywood bombshell and also the actress Charlize Theron. Yes, David Beckham was there, having earlier in the week been plonked at the top table of England's 2018 World Cup bid team, a body that until now has been concerned solely with the daily business of firing its members with such fluency that we're edging ever closer to a point where everyone in the country will have at some point been either (a) a member of the Sugababes, or (b) acrimoniously ousted from the England 2018 bid team.
One man at least seemed very pleased with the Beckham redeployment. "They should use him for everything for ever," Sepp Blatter said, repeatedly calling Beckham "a good guy" and sounding as ever like a man for whom every utterance is just a brief hiatus between cramming basketball-sized buffet luncheon scotch eggs between his lips.
And maybe the bid is on track at last. Beckham is extremely good at this kind of thing, with his expertise in the plastic arts of brand-wiffle and market-grab. Plus, he's also a fair representation of what English people are good at these days. This is what we've got now. For the bid team not to use Beckham would be a bit like Susan Boyle choosing not to sing I Dreamed a Dream over and over again, but instead releasing an album of groin-thrusting R'n'B anthems called Coming 2 The Boyle or Get Ur Boyle On.
I'm pleased that Beckham is finally putting to good use his rare ability to stand near people and make them feel not just swanky, but also somehow broadly benevolent towards the troubled children of the world. But never mind the carping about his commercial promiscuity. I think we should judge a man such as Beckham, who can pretty much do anything he wants now, by the things he doesn't do. Beckham has never made an embarrassing Christmas single, or put his name to a series of children's books.
He is also yet to produce his own lean mean grilling machine, despite the obvious vacancy created by the recent announcement that George Foreman's market-leading Lean Mean Grilling Machine will soon be retiring to work on its own Lean Mean Grilling Machine – the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine Lean Mean Grilling Machine – with the promise of "giving something back" to lean mean grilling.
The case against Beckham is to a degree based around the irresistible appeal of writing him off. These days Beckham is written off pretty much constantly, a natural side effect of his shallow but endlessly tenacious appeal. Most recently, the accusation has been that he has failed to "crack" America, spending his time instead arguing with bumbag-draped spectators at the three-quarters empty Chicken Bucket Arena. And for a while there was a sense he might be on the wane. Except that here he comes again, hobbling into view like a bandy-legged little horse, World Cup pennants dangling from his jewelled earlobes, illuminated not just as the font of all World Cup hope but also as the person at the end in the new advert for California where Arnold Schwarzenegger says: "Hey, whasss keeping you?" and smiles in a way that suggests he's picturing strangling you very slowly in a darkened corner of an exclusive outdoor spa steam room.
As Blatter and the Wembley crowd appreciate, Beckham has now crossed over decisively into this other world, a piano-tinkling kind of place where you just have to show up and people applaud while you wave and grin and get called things like "Mr Soccer Himself". With this in mind perhaps the real question is: what would Beckham want with the England 2018 bid? For a start, he might actually pull it off. In which case garlands, opening ceremony visibility and roving super‑citizenship await. And in the meantime what Beckham really wants is to play at the next World Cup. The FA now has a stake in him doing exactly this, in wowing Africa, high-fiving Nelson, and generally quivering with A-list spangle. Beckham for another summer, then. And bid permitting, perhaps even Beckham, for ever.
