Fashion stakes

An American Treasury official was commenting recently on Tony Blair’s efforts to get one item on the G8 agenda. ‘We said no over dinner,’ he declared. ‘We said no on the ride home. We said no on the front porch, and still he said, “Come to bed.”’ By the time you read this we will know whether Mr Blair’s persistence has paid on an international financing facility for poorer nations. But persistence clearly pays on the racetrack.

As an admirer of Terry Mills’s highly efficient stable, I am always delighted when the no-nonsense Epsom trainer gets his hands on a good one, as he has with the sprinter Resplendent Glory. Seeing Terry before the first at Sandown on Saturday I asked if Resplendent Glory would be able to cope with an unfavourable draw. ‘It’s not the draw he’s up against, it’s the other horses,’ said Terry, aware that he was stepping up Resplendent Glory from handicap company to a Group Three in the Laurent-Perrier Champagne Sprint Stakes.