The Admirable Marky Dashford

That Daniel Rashford eh? One minute he's bigging up the trans community, the next he's getting the government to make a U-turn on their policy of hiding in big houses while poor children starve. 

Of course Twatt Mancock's a busy fella and it's easy to make mistakes. Like standing right next to someone in parliament when you've been banging on about social distancing for three whole months you dozy prick. Or like Turkish PPE. Amazing how we were lied to about the Turks coming into Europe in 2016 and now we're so desperate for cheap gloves and aprons that we'll buy any old shit off them. 

Still xenophobia is a go-to solution when you've run out of credibility. There's still a market for it, if we look at the Churchill-in-a-Fred-Perry-Looky-Likey Competition that occupied Parliament Square on Saturday. Sexy men though, eh? Everyone just ripe for the wank-bank, ladeez? Lager, hair-loss and spittle roughly thrown together in humanoid form. Lush. Mind you, don't let these Grim Gurgles of Reflux distract you from the racists who manipulate, inflame and then abdicate all responsibility.

Black Lives Matters is here to stay, I hope. As a response 'All Lives Matter' just makes me want to stove in the television. Here's an analogy that might appeal to your average Daily Telegraph bigot. 

Say you want to renovate a tumbledown mansion. And Kevin McCloud says to you "I expect you'll start with the foundations in the Great Hall: the damp course has been neglected and the floorboards are rotten." And you turn to Kevin McCloud and you say "Kevin, ALL THE ROOMS MATTER!" And Kevin says "Well, yes, but if you don't fix the foundations then the whole building's in trouble." And you say "ALL THE FLOORS MATTER, KEVIN!" And Kevin says "You're two of the biggest wankers I've ever met" and you say "ALL WANKERS MATTER, KEVIN." 

Now of course if you're a poor white person you might find it hard to understand why rich brown people like Raheem Sterling are getting all the attention. (By the way it's cos although he's extremely wealthy and very good at his job, people still shout obscenities at him). But of course while this is an issue of race it's also an issue of poverty.

Which brings us back to Marcus Radcliffe. 

Darcus Rashworth's greatest strength in all this - and by God if he can lead the line for England with the same skill and fortitude in 2021 I'll be grabbing the Queen by the ermine and demanding his knighthood be presented on the pitch there and then - but, yeah, his greatest strength is that he's been there and he hasn't forgotten. He was that hungry kid: raised by a devoted but hard-working single parent but without the recourse to family wealth that will no doubt help the children of other more notable absent fathers. Like PM Norris Johnstone. Jernstern treats difficult political issues like he does the offspring of his own carefree spaffing - he heads indoors and hides for a couple of weeks and reappears when Cummings tells him the coast is clear.

Despite the media saturation of  Marius Bashful's call to feed hungry children rather than wait for them to devour each other, Johnson only heard of it yesterday. Which begs the question, what the f**k were you up to? 

Turns out he was busy recording a video to celebrate a brand spanking new trade deal with Australia. As Liz Truss put it, her oratory as uplifting as a seal cull, it's a long-established relationship - we gave Australia some steel to build a bridge and they gave us Edna Everage. See that Europe!? Yep we're in the financial and cultural big league now. Swapping sickening biscuits and salty spreads. And they systematically abuse brown people too! 

(Also Bernice Whoreson was onanistically splurging £960,000 on the prime ministerial plane - it's going to be covered in Union Jacks as it pollutes its way into foreign lands. A sort of airborne hooligan, full of shit-for-brains and begging bowls and on its way to a quasi-dictatorship not very near you.)

Anyway once Marvin Duxford made BJ aware of this iniquity the PM quickly donutted his Limousine of Indifference and headed back towards the foreign country that is Common Decency. These U-turns are becoming as regular as disappearing scientists these days. What Doris Jenson and his breezy sidekick Mitt Handsock tend to do these days is name a figure or a date and then find out later whether any of that is feasible. I'm sure as a flaxen-haired junior gargoyle Beavis Jizzbomb would often declare to anyone that was listening that he'd love a crown and a cloak to swan about in 'and by Tuesday it will be here' and lo and behold some lackey had made it happen otherwise the immigration authorities would have been made aware of his potentially illegal presence in the home of a wholly unaware toff. 

It may be how the world works in Downton Abbey but government policy requires consultation and time - two things Bernice DimSum has no concept of. 

But at least we have distractions to comfort us ordinary mortals. Yes we look around the world and think 'Why are we in the top three stupidest countries in the world?' but forget that - the Premier League's back on. I though I'd be utterly unmoved by the prospect but, actually, I can't wait. In fact we're half an hour into Sheffield United v Villa and I'm writing this pigging blog! 

Any road, whatever else with this footy bonanza let us not forget the magnificent contributions from the footballer Marcus Rashford - not to mention the brilliant and capable young fellas like Sterling and Mings and Sancho - who are proving that players of the beautiful game have smart and beautiful minds too. 

I'm going to watch the match now (well the second half any road). I'm going to cheer like nobody's watching. Where's that lager? 

And we're off! Sort of!

And we're off!

Sport begins in the UK on what people are calling Happy Monday. (Tomorrow is Rueful Tuesday, then its Wait-A-Minute Wednesday, Think-Again-Thursday, F**k-This-Friday, and Stay-At-Home Again Saturday.)

For every life that's being lost during this crisis there's a couple of hundred thousand pounds sterling that's way more important. and anyway it won't half cheer us up! Bye bye Granny, hello French 2000 Guineas! Woohoo!

Yes the first reentry into the sporting calendar is that perennial yawn horse-racing. You remember that, right? It was the bits of Grandstand that you used to turn off every Saturday afternoon. Little men sitting on mighty beasts and cracking them on their flanks is not my idea of fun. I've even stopped having a flutter on the Grand National cos £10 of my money is riding on your back, Neddy,  then you're  more likely to see a curtain being drawn around you than the finishing line.

Incidentally if they shot the jockey too, I swear to God they'd be jumping those horses over those fences with a bit more care.

Horses, I'm told, love horse racing just as much as we do. Really? Funny how they're never in the crowd watching isn't it? They might have helped at Cheltenham - if we could've kept everyone a horse-width apart we could saved 10,000 lives right there.

Anyone, the gee-gees will be galloping around some empty acres for our amusement and penury from today and that's just grand. And it's as meaningless as a Matt Hancock stat.

Snooker is starting too. What you need when a respiratory infection grips the globe is a small room with a few blokes coughing in it just to reassure you. Okay there'll be no audience, but they'll still be taking all the necessary precautions. Washing your hands between every shot is going to take its toll but for those of us old enough to remember it'll just feel like Dott v Ebdon.

Of course the German footy has been going for a bit now and I have to say there's been nothing more impressive than the likes of Sancho and Thuram using their platform to express their support for #BlackLivesMatter and justice for George Floyd. Of course there's nothing condemning a racist assassination for getting you an instant yellow card. Nice one, ref. If Trump has his way you'll get sent off in the MLS for wearing a t-shirt that says 'That Hitler? Not a big fan.'

People will always say keep politics out of sport. Bollocks. Sport is a brilliant platform for political statements and so it should be. Ask Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Peter Norman come to that. Ask Jesse Owens for God's sake. Ask Colin Kaepernick. Ask the entire country of South Africa.

There are now young black sportspeople pointing out that Floyd's death is the ghoulish and wicked extreme in the everyday world of casual racism that dogs not just the US but here too. Rashford, Brewster, Cori Gauff, Naomi Osaka. They are not sucking it up and neither should they.

And Lewis Hamilton (yeah, I know Formula 1 isn't really a sport) but Hamilton has addressed this head-on and pointed to the silence amongst an almost exclusively white world of motor racing. His fellow drivers have responded.

Others have suggested that the hashtag #blacklivesmatter is somehow unacceptable. These 'reasonable' folk who say 'No, no, no ... ALL lives matter.' As if by pointing out the atrocious inequality of their income and treatment, and the recurrent obscenity of cops killing black men, they are somehow privileging themselves. As Rhian Brewster tweeted 'We don't want special privilege. A level playing field is all we've been crying for.'

'All Lives Matter' is just people unaffected by prejudice, and unaware of their own privilege, telling black people to go away and get a better slogan and then we can talk. It's patronising, irrelevant bullshit.

Meanwhile back in Blighty and all is well. Thanks to Dominic Cummings and his litany of gutless apologists - do these men have remotely activated electrical filaments in their urethras or are they just gutless worms? - Britons can get back to being proper Britons again, using our British common sense. We can throw ourselves into the sea and summon an air ambulance. We can crowd onto beaches, disperse a bit more Corona and then leave said beaches looking like Carrie Syminds front room after she'd confronted Boris Johnson about the Arcuri affair.

We can do what we like because Dom can. For a while there we were all pulling together, keeping our two metres, thinking of others, not least the poor sods we clap every Thursday night. Then we realised that we don't really care about other people. Rules are for other people, right?

We look at our sportspeople - often they are young, inexperienced, brilliant and well-paid - and when they f**k up we haul them over the coals. If they're black and they f**k up, even worse. They're role models, you see. They should be using their position to encourage goodness and decency.

But if you're in government, you don't need to worry about being a role-model. You can lie, relentlessly; you can father children and abandon them; you can hang out with European neo-fascists; you can take an infected person the length of the country and make up the most laughable excuses for driving them out on a birthday trip and it's fine because what you do doesn't particularly matter. You're not a 20-year old footballer with ten England caps.

Except that's not true. If the person who makes the rules breaks the rules then the rules stay broken. Because trust is broken. We all know that. No amount of horse-racing will take that fact away.