Remember when England last won the Ashes (that’s cricket, by the way)? It was just four years ago on home territory, accompanied by much celebration across the land.

Typically, when England played the rematch in Australia the following year, they were whitewashed 5-0. Groan!

This summer it will happen again. Shall we win, or will the usual Australian dominance emerge? Certainly, the team is not playing well right now.

Here’s what I wrote in the aftermath of that great sporting victory on October 20, 2005:

Phoenixes rise from the ashes we are told. So do nations.

This Jack Tar has jumped ship. He will not be content with the dark, satanic mills of postmodern egalitarianism again. They have been warned.

Indeed they had. But they’re still with us, four long years on. “About to go” is not enough. We want them out now.

Preferably before the Ashes battle begins.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Confusion or Confucius?
Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley
David Cameron, your country needs you
How to make sense of economics

As a Silly Season exercise, let us imagine what might have been had the Labour Party chosen Gordon Brown instead of Tony Blair as its leader in 1994?

Let’s assume that he had won the election in 1997 with a 40-seat majority — Gordon isn’t the stuff of which landslides are made.

Tony Blair would probably have been given the Foreign Office, allowing him plenty of opportunities to scour the world for freebie holiday venues — and keeping him out of his master’s way.

Would Gordon still be PM in 2008?

If he had put up a straight bat — Geoffrey Boycott style — he would almost certainly have won the 2001 election. The Conservatives were simply not ready for office. Even a man with all the charisma of a sedated walrus could have won that, although probably with a reduced majority — let’s say, 25.

In those circumstances Brown wouldn’t have had the reputation of the Man in the Iron Mask, locked away in the Treasury for 10 years in a long sulk matched only by Edward Heath’s — a fellow traveller with similar psychological characteristics.

And we wouldn’t remember him going from Batman to bit-part player in 12 months either. He would have had the benefit of the doubt, not to mention the unusually benign economic conditions of the past decade.

Dour Gordon might just have hung on in there for two Parliaments on gravitas and “the economy stupid”. But what about the third general election, in 2005?

I don’t believe Brown would have risked the Iraq war, as Blair did just to stay onside with the American President. His ratings wouldn’t have flatlined overnight in the way his predecessor’s did. Somehow Gordon would have kept his head doggedly above water and achieved a reasonable result against Michael Howard in what would have been “the dullest general election in British Parliamentary history”. Let’s give him a majority of 6.

So here we are, back almost in the present day with Gordon Brown still in power and Blair long since gone to the lures of Political Big Brother and other c-list game shows.

David Cameron now comes on the scene and challenges the old walrus. “I am the heir to Brown,” he declares while arriving at the House of Commons in a sledge drawn by huskies. “Vote Blue, ditch Brown” he yells across the dispatch box.

It’s now 2008, with the economy falling apart from the American sub-prime crisis and a hapless Geoffrey Robinson, Chancellor for eight years, getting all the blame for “not fixing the roof when the sun was shining.” He resigns and is quickly replaced by Brown’s closest ally, Alistair Darling. Full circle, you might think.

Let’s say the Prime Minister is a mere five points behind in the opinion polls with everything to play for. True to form he hangs on until early 2009 — just before the full force of the recession bites.

Gordon will never be a national treasure. He may be a Treasury type, but never a treasure. Nevertheless, the public admires his quiet persistence over a decade in its service and goes to the polls in two minds about him and the young pretender, David Cameron.

It’s a hung Parliament. Brown invites Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democrat leader into a Lib-Lab pact and he accepts, eager for office.

Cameron prepares for more years in opposition, secretly believing he will never win against the formidable Brown.

“How I wish Blair had won the Labour leadership back in 1994,” he confides to wife, Samantha. “He would never have won a single election. They would have seen through him right from the start.”

So the American primaries are over. No one can say they were bored.

All that remains of Julius Caesar

In the end a bruised but elevated Barack Obama triumphed deservedly over his street-fighting Moll opponent, Hillary Clinton. Whatever anyone thought of the outcome, it was a bravura spectacle on both sides.

Here’s a quick recap of what I posted here nearly four months ago – this is to allow you to assess Syntagma’s forecasting skills.

America’s Presidential election could be decided by which of the three big isms — racism, sexism and ageism — the country is least susceptible to. [...]

1. Do Americans want the Clintons back in the White House?
I would wager a big cigar they don’t.

2. Is John McCain too old?
The country that re-elected Ronald Reagan is not going to be put off by a man of 70.

3. Will America go with Obama’s left/liberal internationalist agenda?
Apart from a few white supremacists, I don’t think this election will turn specifically on race. Obama cuts across many traditional boundaries in the population and has an intellectual stature that suggests it will not. But in the campaign proper, his policies will be increasingly examined. [...]

In a year that’s made for the Democratic party, its two, admittedly impressive, candidates are likely to eliminate themselves by recent memories of past imperfections on the one hand, and an excessive zeal for the lost world of the sub-Marx master plan on the other. [...]

My guess is that [McCain] will win in a tight finish. But not so tight that we again become absorbed by the hanging chads of Florida.

Well, not too bad so far. We got the Democratic candidate right and I think a tight finish is almost guaranteed, especially as Obama lacks Hillary’s clout in the big swing states.

After the scintillating primary campaigns, I’m more certain than ever of my final prediction — that John McCain will be the next President of the United States. I believe Obama may be also … but in four or eight years.

Whenever I watch Obama speak, I’m reminded of a young Tony Blair before he became British Prime Minister, minus the prancing show pony act. The same certainties are there, the evangelistic language bordering on the biblical, the near-identical belief in the nostrums of left/liberalism.

Still to come for the young(ish) Senator from Illinois is the realization that none of these things work in the end. He should look at Labour Britain after 11 years of Blair and Brown. A wasteland of lost hopes and dreams as substandard politicians, drawn almost exclusively from the student activist class, recognize the awful truth: that life is too complicated to be micro-managed by government. Years of simplistic formulations driven by secondhand idealism, not truth, inevitably end in failure.

So who will be the new American Caesar?

During the coming campaign, I believe America will awaken to the fact that decisions have to be taken at the point of maximum competence — or as near it as possible. And that’s not by a government machine.

McCain may not be perfect, but he surely knows that to be true.

Have you noticed how the world appears to be overflowing with Greek and Shakespearean tragedies right now? From the never-ending Diana Inquest to stuttering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the slow-motion unwinding of the world economy, the planet has become a tangled network of crumbling dreams and broken promises.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister

None more so than applies to Gordon Brown, Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister.

Regular readers may recall that, back in March, one of Syntagma’s resolutions was to give up politics. I chose the wrong moment. From the fall of Blair to the rise and precipitate decline of Brown, it’s been a fascinating rollercoaster of insights into the political psyche.

Brown, who as recently as the summer was basking in a Churchillian glow, amid a welter of crises during the holidays, is now a quivering wreck, shot through by one disaster after another. After waiting and plotting for ten years to get the job, he must now be musing on the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for … you may get it.”

First he reneged on a promised referendum on the EU constitution; then he promoted and backed off an early general election when the polls ran against him. Next, an obscure northern mortgage bank, Northern Rock — which just happens to be the fifth largest in the UK, after the big four — got caught in the worldwide credit crunch. Brown’s own regulatory system didn’t even splutter into action while all this was going on. Now taxpayers are bailing out the bank to the tune of £30 billion ($62bn), which, according to Anatole Kaletsky in The Times (London), is “the biggest financial support operation ever offered to any private company by any government anywhere in the world”.

That was followed by HM Revenue and Customs — a department created by G. Brown himself — losing half the nation’s personal details, including bank account data, in the post. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all this week Brown has been submerged by yet more scandals over unlawful Labour party funding, which is now in the hands of the police at Scotland Yard.

Success in the top political job demands two qualities : leadership, and competence as an administrator. Brown has neither. He hasn’t the charisma to be PM, and lacks administrative abilities. In other words, he has been promoted two or three notches above his level of competence. Moreover, his Cabinet is stuffed full of third-raters and hopeless middle managers who would never make the board in a decent private company.

I fear this Labour government will hang on until mid-2010 — the latest date for the next election — unless the police finally nail them for money-laundering of political donations.

Brown is a clever and highly educated man, someone I would normally admire, but he’s a philosopher not a politician. His fatal flaw is a vanity that delivers an overwhelming desire to be the top dog, although he is conspicuously unqualified for the task.

Even as a philosopher he lacks the wisdom and objectivity to recognize his own deficiencies. Psychologically he’s an observer, not a doer. A backroom wallah, not the front man for a nation.

Self-knowledge requires a degree of personal honesty which the dour Scot has yet to achieve.

Last month I did a little piece on Tony Blair’s departure from office. I mentioned in passing that he was a something of a techno-dummy [British understatement].

I remember him at the British launch of Windows XP stumbling through a speech of eye-watering ineptitude. When he came to the bit where he had to explain what XP was, his wife had to step in and describe the product. Sooo embarrassing.

Anyway, now that he’s left office, more news of his monumental ignorance reaches Syntagma’s ears. It seems he’s bought his first cell/mobile phone — ever. It’s a red Motorola, which sounds like a freebie from Richard Branson to me.

After taking lessons in how to use the thing, he eventually managed to send a text message. The reply came back :

“Who are you?”

Perhaps “Take me to your leader” might have been better.

Back to the drawing board, Tone. No iPhone for Christmas for you.

He’s gone!

After 10 seemingly endless years, the old ham has gone.

We’ve criticized him enough on this non-political site so don’t intend to give him a Syntagma drubbing today.

A colleague who knew him well — and liked him — summed Blair up this way : “He’s charming, courteous and kind. He has all the manners of a top British schoolboy. He means well, and has worked hard for the country.”

You sense a “but” coming and you’re right.

“But he has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. He knows very little about anything outside his narrow specialism of the criminal law, and believes that charm (his) is all he needs to be Prime Minister. He can’t even send an email and finds computers utterly baffling.”

Tony Blair is hopeless at detail, mastering only the emotional tone of a brief. Decisions were made on the basis of, “Does this make me look cool?” That quality made him a star in America, especially after his unqualified support following 9/11.

In Britain, however, his lack of grip and concentration meant he botched every level of domestic policymaking, and leaves the country in a worse state than it was in the mid-1970s when another Labour government brought it to its knees economically.

Verdict? He didn’t do the detail, and Britain suffered the result.

He will not be missed — at home at least.