Nor are Germany’s interests in EU budget reform necessarily consonant with Britain’s. In Europe, Ms Merkel’s empathy with the new EU members and their shared aversion to centralisation may not translate into support for the British view of a looser European Union. Add a dash of conventional Atlanticism and a Thatcherite zeal for sound finances; add an awareness that, for historical reasons, no German leader can lurch too far to the right, and here could be the “third-way” chancellor that Mr Blair has been waiting for.The trouble is that there is much about a Merkel chancellorship that Downing Street may not like in practice. He met more resistance as he tried to introduce flexibility into Germany’s labour market than he, or Downing Street, may have expected – or, perhaps, his own socialist instincts held him back. Early hopes in London that Mr Schr? might loosen the German-French alliance or transform it into a troika with Britain have never really been realised either.At home, too, Mr Schr? has disappointed. His fierce hostility to the war in Iraq has set the tone for a “foreign policy for peace” that he has carried over into this campaign. For months now, the signals from Downing Street have strongly suggested a warm welcome for Angela Merkel, if her centre-right alliance is elected to lead Germany on Sunday.

Ms Merkel was f?d as Germany’s leader-in-waiting when she came to London earlier this year, and contacts have continued.Her prospects of forming a government without a coalition partner now look slimmer than they did, but there are compelling reasons why Downing Street may be happy to see Ms Merkel – especially with a free-market partner such as the FDP – replace him as Chancellor. Three years ago, Tony Blair did his bit to help the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schr?, granting a lengthy interview to a Berlin paper on the eve of the election that was inevitably interpreted as a gesture of solidarity The gamble paid off, but only just. The Chancellor was re-elected by a whisker.

This year, Downing Street calculations have been different. So bores continue to complain about the yobbishness of football while lionising the man who had “twat” written on his face while drunk as the perfect role model for younger generations. No real thought, only a lazy and snobbish form of instinct, goes into this debate.Terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker.

All national leaders know that the first rule of other countries’ elections is thou shalt not interfere And time and again, subtly or crassly, they break it. When the England football team were defeated (shame, shock, scandal) by Northern Ireland, the immediate response of the team’s captain was to face the press and explain himself He congratulated the Irish. He avoided blaming the manager, the crowd, the state of the pitch. He agreed that supporters had been let down and that the team had to improve. Even as the press bayed for blood, David Beckham behaved in a manly, honourable way.That is not easy, after a humiliating defeat, but it is the way sporting role-models can set an example.Yet, such is the class-based prejudice which informs much of this issue that, whenever footballers behave well it is ignored, and when cricketers are beery or leery their behaviour is seen as an entirely acceptable bit of fun.

Compared with the summer game, in which everyone is thoroughly agreeable to one another, football is, the argument goes, violent, vain and stupid.Seldom in the annals of sport can a more fatuous argument have been advanced. Even so, ad hominem is the Latin for “play the man, not the ball”, the Alastair Campbell mantra religiously followed by this government for eight years. Isn’t there something refreshing about the dictum being obeyed with style and vigour, by two luminous egos discussing the defining political issue of the age, rather than through whispered malevolent briefings to favoured hacks by greasy apparatchiks in the Commons lobby?Showing startling magnanimity to the man who nicked her job, the ex-Bethnal Green MP Oona King, in the audience on Wednesday, gave the rhetorical nod to Gorgeous George. “I think it’s great to see Britons bringing the tradition of debate to the United States,” she said, and she’s right. But it would be greater still if they now brought it back to Blighty.