Wednesday 6th May

I love snooker, especially the World Championships held in Sheffield.  It always culminates on this recent Monday Bank Holiday, usually quite late at night too.  The thing about snooker is that while most of the players are technically brilliant one of the things which separates them is personality.  And while one doesn’t really know you get a pretty good idea from these long matches, the final is the best of 35 frames and takes two long days.  I usually want Ronnie O’Sullivan to win, but this year he was a bit below par and got beaten by Stuart Bingham.  In the other half of the draw Sean Murphy was sailing through his matches and looked pretty unstoppable.  The other star of this year was Judd trump, who while a brilliantly talented player has flashes of recklessness which make his matches intriguing.  So, after Ronnie went out I thought that Judd would be in the final, and several commentators were backing this to be his year.  But Stuart Bingham slowly ground him down and spectacularly won the semi-final.  The final now looked a shoo-in for Sean Murphy.  But exactly who was Stuart Bingham, a 50 to one outsider, though he was ranked number ten.  He had won a few tournaments and had been around for twenty years and was now thirty-eight, surely too old to win.  He is by all accounts one of the genuinely nice guys in the game, liked by all.  Too nice surely to win this slog-fest.

He did win and he never lost his composure at all.  He was gracious and seemed genuinely surprised at his win; the BBC team concluded that sometimes the nice guy does win.

Let us hope it is an augury for Ed Milliband, who despite the Tory lie that he stabbed his brother in the back (actually he simply stood for leader in a contest his brother also stood in – one wonders if they would have been saying the same thing about David had he won) is a nice guy who genuinely believes he has the best ideas for running the country.  Watching Tory Party Political Broadcasts and the right-wing press one would think he was the nastiest man in England.  He is the underdog, just as Stuart Bingham was.  He has stayed the course and has performed very well, he has won over a lot of skeptics who thought he would fold under Tory pressure, and with two days to go he is neck and neck with the favourite. You never know, the nice guy might actually win.