What Cricket Tells Us About David Cameron

Peter Oborne has an excellent column in the Telegraph today. Much of it reprises Peter’s case that Cameron is a genuine reforming Prime Minister and that the Big Society (or whatever you want to call it) is Cameron’s way of refuting the certainties of the post-war settlement and the excesses of Thatcherism. But wittingly or not it also highlights (deliberately I’m sure) some of the weaknesses of the Prime Minister’s style. Reflecting on Cameron the cricketer, Peter* writes:

Before he became famous, I sometimes used to play cricket with David Cameron. He was an expansive middle-order batsman who possessed all the strokes necessary to assemble a decent score.

The majority of the runs scored by the future prime minister accrued on the leg side of the wicket, and herein lay a fatal flaw. This tendency to strike across the line, allied perhaps to a lack of basic concentration, too often brought about a premature return to the pavilion.