Last week, George Osborne, the temporary Shadow Chancellor, set up a commission to look at a flat tax in Britain, which is a politician’s way of saying he likes the idea.It is a clever ploy, because it dramatises a common criticism of Gordon Brown: that he seems to pursue complication and obfuscation as an objective of tax policy But it is too clever, because the idea is a non-starter. This has emboldened the rigorous free-market think-tanks over here to push the flat-tax idea into the Tory policy vacuum. That should have been the end of the matter, but recently a few east European countries have sought to make it easier for former communists to become capitalists by simplifying their tax systems. In his 2000 campaign, Forbes promised to exempt himself from the benefits of the flat tax Number of primaries won: 0. Some Tories have seized on the flat tax – a single tax rate above a higher starting point that would apply to all personal and corporate income The idea has been around for a while. It was popularised in America by the presidential hopeful Steve Forbes in 1996 Forbes’s net worth: $435m (£237m) Amount he stood to gain by his proposal: $5m a year Number of primaries won: 0. Clarke’s supporters might protest that David Davis would poll even worse against Brown, but Davis is unknown to many voters and has the chance to shape his image, whereas Clarke is familiar, and losing by a two-to-one margin might be the best he could do against Brown.

It ought to be obvious now that simply choosing Clarke rather than Davis would not be sufficient to end the Tory crisis.

As with personnel, so with policy. Whether that is because Clarke is less popular than his supporters think or because Brown is more popular than is often assumed hardly matters. Clarke fared less well than Michael Howard did against Tony Blair when an identical question was asked on the eve of the election in May. Two polls last week were hailed happily by the mainly pro-Clarke media as evidence that he was big box office. Those polls were in effect asking people, “Have you heard of Kenneth Clarke?” We asked a rather tougher question, pitting Clarke directly against the Conservatives’ likely opponent at the next election, Gordon Brown. Our opinion poll today exposes the laziness of the assumption that Clarke is the obvious solution to the Conservative leadership conundrum. There are easy answers and there are right answers.

The two big easy answers of the summer political season have been Kenneth Clarke and flat taxes. Is it not a more beautiful place, in which no one wears bright shirts emblazoned with this year’s sponsor’s name because last year’s sponsor’s name would be too sad for words? In which Victoria Beckham’s boast that she had never read a book would be greeted with a hail of bullets? In which we would never have to hear Sir Alex Ferguson speak again? This is a world worth fighting for, and some of us will fight for it to our last breath.. Resistance is useless.For a moment, though, we can try to imagine a world without football. Like Microsoft or Wal-Mart, football has the sheer heft to dominate its market and obliterate all competitors Nothing can challenge its supremacy It’s the Dalek of sports.

If it did we would soon have the pleasure of hearing the Prime Minister reminisce about seeing Wally Hammond score 336 not out against New Zealand in 1932-33, when he was nobbut a lad Sadly, though, this is just a blip. Cricket is enjoying its day in the sun, but let’s not forget that we are witnessing one of the most exciting Test series ever played We can’t expect that to happen every year. The huge sums it generates are directly proportional to the gullibility of its fans – and that’s supposed to be a good thing?It can’t last. In the meantime we are meant to applaud when this pointless activity calls itself “a global brand”.

We have had to tolerate sports pages in which football dominates beyond all sense, TV news programmes which now regard minor footballing stories as of greater significance than all foreign events bar major disasters and, worst of all, advertisements for shoes sucking up to football fans by pandering to the received opinion that football is more important than anything else. For years we have drifted off into our own thoughts when talk has turned to Reading’s undoubtedly excellent promotion prospects for this or any other season. And into both pubs some young people ventured, and said (in slightly different accents and idioms) “Oi! What’s this shit? What about Manchester United?” which we can safely presume was on the other side. And in both pubs the barmen and customers told the young people to piss off.That cricket has done this is all the more thrilling for those of us who have loved it since childhood But let’s not be exclusive about this Hating football has a broader constituency than that For years we have had to stay silent. But was anyone reading them? Did anyone care? No, like Tony Blair, we’d moved on.

Strangely enough two friends of mine had similar experiences in pubs a couple of weeks ago.