Rundle’s UK: Tories snookered by a Lib-Dem rise

OK, so look clearly this competition is getting interesting, and it’s time to focus on key, important public events. In the second day of play at the Sheffield Crucible, veteran Stephen Hendry has been matched game for game by Zhang Anda, the 18-year-old sensation from China. Zhang’s game is quite unusual for a young player — solid, almost dull, few driving long shots or trick arabesques. Since that’s Hendry’s style too, neither have been able to get a clear lead, so it’s nine-nine…

What? I’m talking about the snooker, duh. The UK championships has just commenced at the venerable Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, with a blinder of a match. Rocket Ronnie O’Sullivan, Hendry, Steve “Interesting” Davis, they’re all back for another round.

This is a real tussle, a year in which some of the old guard will be finally be handing over to new players. What did you think I was talking about?

Oh, yeah the election. That got interesting too, but you really need to understand that now that the snooker championships have started, the eyes of the nation are turned baizeward. BBC2 runs hours of the stuff, and in the final week or so — which will pretty much coincide with the election — I will be wall to wall.

Everyone will watch it, no-one admit to it. It’s pure tele-methodone, and the fact that the national broadcaster will give over its second channel to four thousand frames of the stuff tells you all you need to know about Brit culture.

But OK in the election things really did get interesting. The whole country is in a portentous mood, on account of there’s a giant cloud of invisible ash hanging over us, which won’t let us do anything.

I was in the pub with the “spiked” Marxist-libertarian gang when the cloud really hit, and on the giant TV screen square to god the crawl at the bottom of the news said “giant volcanic ash cloud — authorities say no cause for alarm”, and it was clear we were suddenly in a bad sci-fi movie. (“I don’t believe in the ash cloud,” someone said, which is why it’s good to drink with “spiked” on such occasions, it’s confidence instilling).

The ash cloud brings out the Dunkirk spirit in everyone. All day there were pictures of people queuing at airports, and since the English like nothing better than to queue to no purpose while being attacked from the air, the whole country was in hog-heaven. It wasn’t just the bloody northerners who were having singalongs in the buses, the whole place was a little giddy.

Such may madness may explain the polling results in the wake of last week’s debate, with Nick Clegg riding towards second and in some cases first place in the ratings. A YouGov poll, the online polling outfit which uses larger samples than most, had the Lib-Dems at 33%, the Tories at 32%, and Labour on a miserable 26%.

The reasons aren’t hard to find. In the first debate last week, Clegg was the only talking sense, because he was the only one not bound by a series of absurd demands to suck up to microsocial categories in marginal electorates and try and make a common narrative out of it. Both Labour and Tory have resorted to the absurd notion of making savings through “efficiencies”, so as to preserve the fiction that the fiscal emergency can be dealt with, without pain to any particular group with an agenda.

Clegg was the only one who acknowledged that getting the budget back into shape would involve either tax rises or cuts or both, and since a lot of people hadn’t heard that before, the effect has been dramatic. Despite a bit of retro wisdom, nobody had a clue this was going to happen. It’s the first genuine event of the election.

The sudden revival of politics within UK politics even eclipsed the return of the Actress, who came back to Soho re-blonded, with four inch heels in her bag, and a Japanese blue steel kitchen knife she’d bought for someone’s birthday, looking like a Mossad assassin on a lunch break.

After she offered to soothe the “wounds of my jealousy” with the “ice from her vodka” I suggested she could probably chip a couple of blocks off her heart to do the job without ruining her drink or troubling rising sea levels overmuch, at which point further appearances in this column became subject to veto.

But that’s neither here nor there. It’s time to tackle the numbers in this business, the things that really matter, the figures that determine the way in which we will live.

So let’s go back to the “dance card” question.

As you may recall, last week we decided to crowd source the enigmatic communiqué from Norway that “Ned Kelly ate my dance card”, and the Crikey readership did themselves proud in responding (nedkellyatemydancecard@hotmail.co.uk, for any late entries) for any stragglers. Though some people were over literal in reminding us what a “dance card” is — a list tied around ladies’ wrists at dances, upon which suitors would write their name — most were more searching.

Crunching the numbers with some oversimplification gives us:

Thanks to “Skippy Dog” who pointed out that the Norwegian version: “han spiste min dans kortet” is far more alarming, but the winner has to be a “Bhakthi P” of Melbourne whose accurate assessment was so despairingly cynical in one so young, that I will not be ruining your lunch with it.

Hendry’s got the ball in the 19th of 19 frames now, with the score at 9 all, a shot by shot fight all the way through, but the old dog is getting there….

The sudden rise of Clegg, and the prospect that a whole series of seats may become three-corner battles, and Tory-Lib Dem battles has thrown well-worn election tactics into chaos. “A plan in what you have before you get hit” the old boxing saying goes, and the two major parties are reeling.

As it happens, a Lib-Dem rise is worse for the Tories, as they have to be in a commanding position — around 40% — for the swing to be taking more seats from Labour than from team Blue. Without that handy margin — and most pre-debate polls indicated the Tories hovering around 36-38% — the Lib-Dem surge is a disaster for the Tories, strengthening a Labour-Lib-Dem block.

Dave Cameron has responded by rolling out a campaign of “a vote for Clegg is a vote for Brown”, and taking his parents on the hustings. Yes, his parents. Crosby-Textor is assisting the Tory campaign. Not to make you nervous boys, but if you don’t nail this one, Subway is hiring.

Flights remain grounded through tomorrow.

Hendry passes the frame-ball mark! He’s on the way to his eighth title!

Rack ’em up and let’s run it again. The reds still dominate the table…