Monday
The sight of Mo Farah sprinting away from the field in the 5,000 metres at the London Anniversary Games was a welcome reminder that the Rio Olympics are nearly on us and that for a couple of weeks we can all get excited about sports, such as rowing and hockey, that almost no one watches in the intervening four years. Less welcome was the reminder that none of the British track and field commentators seem willing to utter one word against Sebastian Coe, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations. As far as the Brit commentators are concerned, the fact that their old mate Seb was vice-president of the IAAF during the period when its president, Lamine Diack, was implicated in one of the worst doping cover-ups in the sport’s history is not really worth mentioning. Although Coe has said little on the matter, either he knew about the scandal and chose to do nothing or he was so hopeless as vice-pres that he was out of the loop. Either way, his appointment doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the sport’s future.
Tuesday
Labour isn’t the only political party searching for a kinder, gentler way of doing politics. After Nigel Farage resigned after failing to get elected as an MP for the seventh time at the last general election, Suzanne Evans was appointed leader – for three days. Then Nige unresigned himself and was reinstated as leader. Evans’s crime had been to be the sort of candidate that normal people might want to vote for as long as they didn’t have to think too hard about what she was saying. Since then, Evans has been suspended by Ukip’s national executive committee, which has put paid to her chances of becoming leader again. Today she formally announced she had given up trying to overturn her suspension and was going to support Lisa Duffy, a candidate no one had ever heard of instead. The favourite to take over from Nige is Ukip MEP Steven Woolfe, who is best known for reciting a poem he had written during the referendum campaign: ”As the sun fell on scapa fell / I heard the news and final death knell / Of England’s beaten heart / Destroyed from within / By its own kith and kin / Who sort to break it apart.” How come Kipling never had the linguistic audacity to internally rhyme “fell” with “fell”, to insert a homophone for sought that suggests the power to exclude and to use the absence of punctuation as a metaphor for having no control over our borders.
Wednesday
Meanwhile Labour lurches from one self-inflicted injury to another. On his first day out and about in his leadership campaign, Owen Smith managed to alienate most female voters by saying he was going to “smash” Theresa May “back on her heels”. Jeremy Corbyn remains the odds-on favourite, which will please most of the Labour party membership and the Conservatives. Opinion polls published today give the Tories a 12-point lead over Labour; more worryingly, almost one-third of those who voted Labour at the last election now think Theresa May will make a better prime minister than Corbyn. What this means is that if Corbyn does retain the leadership, then May could well call an early general election, at which Labour would lose at least 44 seats. After which disaster, no doubt, Labour would be forced to have yet another leadership contest at which Corbyn could well be re-elected yet again. No wonder one of his supporters, Jon Lansman, recently tweeted: “Democracy gives power to people. ‘Winning’ is the small bit that matters to political elites who want to keep power themselves.” A cynic might call it turkeys voting for Christmas.
Thursday
There’s an old gag that ends with the punchline: “I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.” Channel 4 has decided to take this as the starting point for its new dating show, Naked Attraction, which cuts to the chase by treating its contestants as personality-free slabs of meat who choose one another on the basis of whether they like each other’s bits. “It’s very presentable when you go down there,” says one bloke graciously about a woman called Aina. Aina very wisely decides not to let him go down there. That was the show’s moral high point. You could say that Channel 4 is taking its race to the bottom rather too literally.
Friday
It’s often claimed that Boris Johnson speaks fluent Latin, French and Italian and passable German and Spanish. Yesterday he got the chance to construire some ponts with les Français after his speech at the French embassy, shortly after he was appointed foreign secretary, during which he was booed by some members of staff. In Paris for talks with his French counterpart, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who only recently accused him of telling loads of lies during the referendum campaign, Boris chose to address the French media in their own tongue. While there was something heroic about a British foreign secretary for once not shouting slowly in Anglais to make himself understood, Boris’s speech did suggest he had once again been economical with the actualité. Fluency in Boris-world is bumbling along in a public school British accent. “Bonjour Johnny Français homme. Je wanter to reassure vous que Grande-Bretagne ne quitte pas Europe although si vos border guards cause quarante mile traffic jams on the A Vingt encore then we may do. Tout ce que happen avec Brexit est that France will now have to combattre Les Allemands toute seule parce que Britain will not venir a votre rescue comme nous did dans les deux dernières guerres de monde. Merci amis.” Boris didn’t take any questions. No point in pushing your luck.
Digested week, digested: The IOC came, they saw, they did as little as possible.
