Gordon Brown should delay the election until 3 June.

With the Conservatives about to dominate the media for an entire week, New Statesman readers need cheering up. So here's my Panglossian view of the political future. Gordon Brown can delay the election until 3 June: the requirement is to call an election no later than five years from the date of the last one, and to hold it four weeks thereafter. By then, the feel-good factor should be at its maximum. Alistair Darling will have kept spending high and taxes low, as is economically justifiable. Signs of recovery should be evident. Amid glorious early summer weather, voters will be looking forward to an inevitable English triumph in the football World Cup, starting a few days later.

The Tories, therefore, will get not a landslide, but a hung parliament in which they are the largest party. England's footballers will go out in the first round, with Wayne Rooney banned for life after strangling a referee. There will be drought and hosepipe bans, followed by catastrophic autumn floods. Later, after a run on sterling, foreign creditors will demand an immediately balanced budget. David Cameron, determined to protect the new Conservative brand, will propose moderate public spending cuts but big tax rises. The cabinet and party will rebel. Cameron will join a "national government" in which he remains PM but Labour holds most ministerial posts, with Ed Miliband, Labour leader, as foreign secretary, Vince Cable as chancellor and Lord Mandelson as business secretary. In a fresh election, a Labour-dominated national government will romp home and the Tories will be reduced to 52 seats.

You may think this scenario implausible, though it is roughly what happened to the minority Labour government of 1929-31. I am sure our revered saviour Mandelson, whose grandfather was among the Labour cabinet rebels in 1931, has it all worked out.

Eden's agonies

Andrew Marr was right to ask Brown about his health during a BBC interview. I sometimes wonder if a prime minister shouldn't undergo annual medical examinations, so that a panel of doctors and distinguished ex-ministers can assure us he is sufficiently fit in mind and body to discharge his duties. Brown, after all, can launch wars, and his present duties include saving us from economic meltdown and global warming. It didn't greatly matter that, unknown to the public, Winston Churchill suffered a severe stroke, leaving him physically and cognitively impaired, during his final term. Britain then faced no great crises. But it mattered that his immediate successor, Anthony Eden, suffered a botched operation in 1953. Eden's judgement during the 1956 Suez crisis, when he was sending troops to war, was at least partially impaired by pain, sleepless nights and drugs. Brown is probably in perfect health, but close relatives of men serving in Afghanistan would surely be grateful for reassurance.

Heads should roll

The case of the Essex school dinner lady, sacked for telling parents about their child being bullied, looks like further evidence that everybody in authority has gone mad. But the press moves, without hesitation, from the particular to the general. If one dinner lady is disciplined because of a casual conversation, we are led to believe that a rigid law has gagged dinner ladies throughout the land. Fearful dinner ladies then refuse to discuss their work outside school, while overcautious governors and head teachers issue stern warnings about doing so. Before we know where we are, the actions of a single literal-minded and foolish head have become common practice. If there is an epidemic of MAD (Mad Authority Disease), the press may have helped create it.

All at sea in a sieve

In the 1960s academic sociologists were hugely influential; their work appeared in Penguin paperbacks, and they had a significant effect on political decision-making. One of them was Dennis Marsden, who died last month at 76. In Education and the Working Class (1961), a study based on children at grammar and secondary modern schools in Huddersfield, he and his contemporary, the late Brian Jackson, wrote: "Middle-class families are in so many ways insured against failure . . . any form of nominally academic selection will, in effect, be a form of social selection . . . selection is not an event that happens and ends suddenly at 11 . . . It is a process that is at work all the time from the moment the child enters school to his final leaving: a gentle shaking of the sieve, with now and again one or two big jerks. Even within the grammar school, working-class children are being pushed out of the sieve in large numbers." To those who now prattle about how grammar schools ensured social mobility, nothing more needs to be said.

A good, sound beating

Stop press! One-day cricket, 50 overs a side, so recently condemned by everybody (including me) as a formulaic bore, is now unpredictable and exciting. England, beaten 6-1 in a one-day series against Australia, have won two matches and threaten to reach the final of a major - well, majorish - tournament. This is not the first time our cricketers have excelled after being thoroughly thrashed. Our rugby players behave similarly. I put it down to both games' strong links with the traditionally harsh regimes of public schools. It is deeply embedded in our chaps' psyches that they need a sound beating to motivate them. If this seems like semi-bigoted nonsense, it is no more so than some explanations advanced for the performances of West Indian and Indian cricketers.

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