While Michael Gove's U-turn on school sports is welcome, why does the coalition heed these critics alone?
This appears to be a government whose ministers draw up with relish schemes for severe spending cuts only for the prime minister to modify them as and when he hears about them, and has a chance – in between party-going and celebrity glad-handing – to apply his PR man's slide rule. At the time of the comprehensive spending review David Cameron stepped in to protect the armed forces, and now he has presumably had a word in the ear of education secretary Michael Gove, who will not after all be axing Labour's school sports partnership as planned.
That's good, I suppose, what with so many of our schoolchildren being so fat; but it's also disturbing. Some cynics suggested that Gove was proposing to cut the SSP because he was the sort of nerd who always got picked last in school football matches. Reading that, I felt my first twinge of sympathy for the earnest, parsonical fellow because ... well, I myself was not usually the last boy to be picked, but I was often the last entirely able-bodied boy to be picked, or I would be weighed in balance against a slightly better athlete: "We'll, have Wilson, you can have Martin and Briggs." But I didn't mind, because I didn't respect the footballers, or sportsmen in general. The only other thing they were good at was fighting, and their number included all the worst school bullies.
I was reminded of this last week when I saw an image of David Beckham wearing a silly moustache on the front page of the Sun. It was a particularly nasty shock, because I had been hoping that Beckham would be taking a back seat for few days after the dastardly Fifa men inflicted (thank God!) their recent rebuff.
Why the moustache? Well, Beckham was sharing a jape with some hirsute officer type at the Sun's first army awards, the Millies. (I suspect that Beckham only ever shares in jokes rather than actually inaugurating them.) His good mate, Cameron, was there, and I wonder if it was at this event that the PM resolved to do for school sports what he'd done for the forces, and pull the rug out from under Gove.
Or had he decided on the reversal while staking his prime ministerial prestige on that undignified lunge for the 2018 World Cup? (A rather greedy lunge, it seemed to me, since we already had the Olympics in the bag.) Another possibility is that the announcement was trailed to forestall the possibility of snide remarks being made by the sports establishment at the Sports Personality of the Year Awards. Or then again, was the announcement made yesterday because Cameron was about to switch on the lights at the Olympic Park? Or was it simply that Cameron has been petitioned en masse by those modern gods, the sports stars, ever since the Gove plans were first revealed?
If so, they have prevailed where lobbyists for the arts, universities, pensioners, local authorities and hospitals have failed. But how many of the latter are famous, or gold medallists, or world No 1s? It strikes me that we're all being bullied by the sportsmen, just as I was bullied by them at school. In sum, it is sport that keeps Rupert Murdoch in power, and it is Murdoch who keeps the government in power. So sport is talked up, just as though it were in itself a moral good. But what is its virtue? Don't give me that Corinthian stuff. It was always a public school con to keep the oiks down. Or is it that business of healthy mind in a healthy body? Given that my children are going to have to pay a premium to study the arts at university, and given that my excellent local library is about to close, I can't help thinking that we're neglecting the first part of the equation.
Andrew Martin's novel The Somme Stations will be published in March 2011