Cameron's stuck his oar in AGAIN.
Here's what the Guardian thinks of him getting involved:
As part of English football's ongoing commitment to self-parody, I should like Carlos Tevez to resurrect his baby's dummy goal celebration next time Manchester City play Liverpool. Between that and Luis Suárezrunning around biting people, the pitch would resemble a giant nursery. Ideally, half-time would see the ground staff lay out lots of foam mats on the pitch, and players would be given a cup of milk and told to lie down on one of them for a nap.The supernanny figure in all of this, of course, would be David Cameron, whose inevitable intervention into the Suárez nonsense this week read like another wrong answer to cult cartoon strip You Are The Prime Minister.
The best thing you can say about Cameron's contribution is that it didn't set a precedent. That precedent, naturally, was set by his predecessor-but-one. In seeking to pinpoint the exact moment prime ministerial perspective was irretrievably lost, many will cite the time Tony Blair went on Richard and Judy and called for the then England manager Glenn Hoddle to quit (I shall leave it to more eminent theologians than I to determine the precise level of irony in someone who believes in transubstantiation seeing fit to query the eccentricities of someone else's religious beliefs).As I say, many will claim that Hoddle intervention was the lapsarian moment. In fact, though, the watershed had come a year earlier, when Blair had affected to order the home secretary to investigate a miscarriage of justice involving one Deirdre Rachid.
When the prime minister of the day takes to the dispatch box in the cause of a fictional soap opera character, the floodgates have not been so much opened as detonated.So on the one hand, it was hardly a surprise to find Downing Street going the extra mile this week in response to a reporter's question about Suárez. "It is rightly a matter for the football authorities to consider," opined the PM's official spokesman, before refusing to leave it at that. "As part of their consideration," he instructed, "I think it would be very understandable if they took into account that high-profile players are often role models."
Well quite. It starts with mere footballers doing the biting, but before you know it their nefarious methods have corrupted the entire upper strata of British public life. If Cameron doesn't get a grip of this crisis now – RIGHT NOW – it is perfectly possible to imagine a time in which, say, the director general of the BBC might be moved to nip a professional colleague on the arm. I think it would be helpful to start thinking of these people as the biters within.
And yet ... having just lived through the fortnight of political nostalgiaporn since Margaret Thatcher's death, it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that there really was a time – before Tony – when prime ministers might have felt it beneath their office to offer a comment on a disciplinary breach on a football field. It is completely inconceivable to imagine John Major wading into such a matter, even when Duncan Ferguson was actually jailed for the headbutt that broke the camel's back. If Major had a view about all those horrors who used to butt Alan Shearer's elbow, he did the public the courtesy of keeping it to himself. His predecessors were similarly content to limit their public utterances to frivolities such as "the economy" or "social policy."How unfathomable that now seems.
As the self-styled heir to Blair, Cameron simply refuses to keep Ordinary People in the dark on these vital footballing matters, perhaps imagining that he is speaking to them in the only language the poor dolts understand.He lost no time in telling us that he thought Fabio Capello was a good man and a good coach, but that the Italian was wrong to object to the FA's decision to remove John Terry as England captain. We know he doesn't like discrimination in football, last year convening a bizarre Downing Street "summit" on the matter – an event as stagy as it was woolly-minded.We know he was "frustrated" by Panorama's expose of Fifa corruption coming on the eve of the 2018 World Cup vote, apparently so clueless as to think England was within a million miles of being gifted the tournament by a so-called Fifa family that transparently detests us.
We know he was in a frightful bate about the possibility of England players not being allowed to wear poppies on their shirts, and we know he found the other weekend's violent skirmishes in Newcastle and at Wembley "deplorable" and more.On sporting matters that intersect more significantly with his day job, however, Mr Cameron is conspicuously silent.
On the breaking of coalition promises not to continue the sell-off of playing fields, he declines to be drawn. Last year, he refused to comment on the Bahrain Grand Prix despite the backdrop of protests and allegations of human rights abuse, insisting that it was only "a matter for Formula One."If only football were also deemed capable of getting along without him. But if we must have a facile debate about role models, perhaps it is worth asking whether prime ministers ought to have more pressing things to do with their time than lavish it on babyish fouls.
That, one can't help feeling, is the rather more biting question.
