UKIP as well as the Pakistanis are on a sticky wicket of their own making.

I cribbed the headline from Simon Heffer's piece in today's DT, indeed I am beginning to wonder if Heffer is reading this blog! I find the parallels between Cricket's sordid mess and UKIP's quite compelling. As Heffer writes, 'The last things the banana republicans who call the shots in international cricket want is a man of serious integrity going in and seeing how very filthy some of the rooms in the house are'. Replace international cricket with UKIP and the quote is just as true. John Howard's proposed  appointment as the man to clean up cricket was vetoed by cricket's ruling cabal. Tim Congdon's leadership bid will be sabotaged by UKIP's Cabal.

I repeat my offer not to contest the UKIP leadership against Tim if Gerard Batten will do the same. Tim is our best and only chance to reform and clean up UKIP.

Another quote from Heffer, " the chairman of many county teams create the same culture of financial greed that is so poisonous out East". Replace chairman with MEPs and East by Brussels and you have a pretty fair description of UKIP's controlling structure. It is built on financial greed and supported by the sycophants dazzled with the prospects of financial gain way beyond what their non-existent talents merit outside UKIP politics..

"For decades the old buffers, the naive, the irresponsible who are the stewards  have pretended it was a gentlemen's game and horrors like this were extremely rare", writes Heffer.. How true, and how true of UKIP members and most branch chairmen. Remember the NoW tape of their sting and the suitcase full of £50 notes and you are nearer the reality of cricket and politics. UKIP politics is emphatically not a gentlemen's game played by gentlemen.

As Heffer says the cricket authorities want a quiet life and to get this difficulty out of the way with minimum fuss. Thus it is with UKIP and their latest alleged  NEC voting irregularities. But as Heffer opines it would be much better for cricket and I opine for UKIP to have the mother of all fusses right now. If we don't then we won't have an EU  withdrawalist party left, just a bunch of house trained posturing, drunken comics kept by the EU in Brussels as a warning to the general European populace of the sort of idiots that will take over if the electorate are ever silly enough to reject the EU.