Labour’s iron discipline

Also: interviewing Binface, and why I prefer Shostakovich to the World Cup

Two vignettes and one conclusion: the Tony Blair Institute in summer-party mode, with the late sunlight washing across London from a theatre balcony, and deep worries about Andy Burnham from Labour donors and veterans. Will he do a deal with the Greens? How left is he going? When I express guarded optimism about the new regime, one senior figure puts his palms together and says with a smile, “I pray for you.” Hmm. And then, the final afternoon of my show of paintings and drawings in Bermondsey. A New Statesman reader arrives, just down from the Durham Miners’ Gala, which was full of the bloodcurdling warnings to Burnham against back-sliding. I hope our new prime minister is a neat dancer.

On being a gadfly in a summer of sport

I’m writing this at the beginning of the week. There is no point in pretending. At the time of writing, nobody south of the border is interested in anything except England-Argentina. Even I, a sport atheist, am being dragged in. Three words separate the genuine sport enthusiast from saddos like me. Whether it’s endless back-passing on the football field, or serve after unbroken serve, they are: “But nothing’s happening.” I can’t help it. At least in a Shostakovich string quartet, the action is constant. I have noticed one obvious parallel between sport and politics: in the end, it is character – focus, staying power, determination to avoid failure and distractions on every side – that separates triumph from disaster.

Bohemian rhapsodising

Let’s talk Czechia. Two female players from this small country, Linda Noskova and Karolina Muchova, were this year’s women’s Wimbledon finalists. Is there something flinty-focused about its sport folk? When my wife was running a university college, she invited Martina Navratilova to talk to the female students. Martina gave a detailed and rather moving account of the barriers she had faced when she first left communist Czechoslovakia for the West: her lack of friends or family, loneliness, language problems. The audience was moved. One asked what advice Martina would give to a young refugee, struggling today. The great tennis player looked down, thought for a moment, then stood up and said without expression: “Crack on.”

For the soul

But I am not just a sport atheist. Shortly before the awful death of Ann Widdecombe, and the Catholic mass for her soul that followed, I was talking to the celebrated biologist, and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins. We agreed on the allure of churchgoing.

Weekly communal singing to well-known, good tunes is civilising and anchoring. The same goes for the mingling of generations and classes in a single room; for private reflection on the week past, its failures and lessons; and for an address – not too long, please – from a thoughtful individual about it all. Like Dawkins, I miss all this. I was brought up on both Testaments in the language of the King James Bible and on the tunes of Parry, Holst and Sullivan. Lovely. It’s just the bit in the middle I can’t swallow.

Policy first

The Burnham ascendancy will end. There will be failure, recrimination and trouble ahead. That’s not politics; that’s life. But as I write, it has been quite the achievement – smooth, disciplined, outwardly polite. Much credit to Keir Starmer and his key adviser, Victoria. Amy Richards in No 10 has helped hugely too.

Team Andy – notably Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley – have done something deeply unusual. The press has been desperately trying to find “feud and fury” stories and had no success. Instead, the incoming team have managed to focus all attention on policy, from tax to immigration, as Burnham wants. This has been a masterclass in discipline – or should I say a mistress-class? I hope that Grace Walsh from Leicester, who sent in an excellent letter last week, accepts our good intentions and remains a subscriber.

The joke’s on whom?

On my LBC show I interviewed Count Binface. One national poll has him ahead of Nigel Farage. That is meaningless, perhaps, because Clacton is Clacton. But I think the contest will come down to this: are the voters there so angry, so ground-down despairing, that they refuse to join a national joke?

This will prove, I think, a bigger question than whether Farage is well protected, is a member of the elite, or has questions to answer about his finances. Mathematically, if all those who don’t like him vote for the bin-headed bloke obsessed with the position of the hand-dryer in the men’s toilets in an Uxbridge pub, Farage could still go down. He’s built his career on patriotism – but wouldn’t that be the most British thing ever?

[Further reading: With Burnham’s cabinet picks still unknown, MPs are struggling to control their anxieties]