Our Kingdom: Anthony Barnett and David Aaronovitch

This is fascinating. Anthony Barnett and David Aaronovitch discussing The Blair Years HERE. Almost in the form of one of those famous Guardian head to head exchanges of letters. What were they called? No matter ...

We Manchester graduates are of course all immensely proud of DA who was our student union president for a time. In the heyday of NUS politics.

But my earliest abiding memory of DA is when he was career NUS hack and current President - a Tankie even then, seen above in an NUS piccie with Sue Slipman and Trevor Phillips. He came as a guest speaker to the British Universities Sports Federation (BUSF) conference. At Lancaster I think it was.

Some of us were trying to cause the wastefully duplicitous BUSF and the Universities Athletic Union (UAU) to amalgamate. Unbelievably this took another thirteen years to achieve. Probably something to do with having self-interested staff and farts in blazers running the thing.

But I digress. David explained that he was a rugby flanker of extremely limited talent. Sadly from the William Ellis rather than William Webb Ellis school of the game. A spoiling flanker he said.

Being a "big fat clumsy twat", he said OWTTE, unable to play the game properly himself ... he was instructed to lurch around and spoil play for everyone else.

No further comment necessary.