To judge from the sudden downpour on the show’s preview day, leaving some marquees flooded, global drowning is a more real threat.Almost the first person I ran into there was the editor of Gardening Which?, that alert watchdog for the horticultural consumer. For the sake of the planet we should be letting wild flowers and weeds run riot over our backyards.Whatever happened to the joy of gardening? You would have thought that the wettest June since Noah would wash some of the gloom from the long faces of the Cassandras of global warming. What once enjoyed a reputation as the cheerful, down-market version of Chelsea has been taken over by the solemn forces of environmental correctness. You will come away convinced that, even if we and our flowers escape being parched to death by drought, we are still doomed because we let plant varieties perish and ignore bio-diversity – the new religion of the age.
At the same time, you will learn that those of us who, year after year, lovingly cram our gardens with delights from nurseries and garden centres, snipping away to keep them trimmed and tidy, have been doing it wrong. If you want to be made truly miserable, today is your last chance to catch this year’s Hampton Court Flower Show. There is talk of a Spice Geriatrics troupe on the Opposition side, but Blair’s Babes seem tiresomely interested in politics.

Flynn (Newport West, Gossips’ Party) admits that “rampant lechery” is still uncommon in the House.”Exhaustion is an effective bromide for the great majority of parliamentarians,” he insists This is debatable. But to the litany of erotic failure you might add the muscle-relaxant effects of John Barleycorn.GORDON Brown delivered his first Budget on 2 July, his mother’s birthday. Does that mean he will have his February Budget on his own birthday, the 20th? He says not. So how about 14 February, a St Valentine’s Day Massacre of the Workshy? One thing is for sure It won’t be water at the despatch box next time He promises himself “something Scottish and alcoholic” A wee dram of Glen CutofftheirGrants perhaps..

The incident exposes the vulnerability of addressing a camera while mingling with a crowd.At York races yesterday, McCririck was being guarded by a minder; not just because of the attack but because Channel 4 always provide him with protection at York. McCririck had the cake squashed into his face while he was telling viewers the latest prices.Although usually happy to delight in his misfortunes, McCririck’s television colleagues were indignant about the attack Quite right, too. Along the way, John Daly’s words could come in handy.AN interesting revelation arises from the cream cake assault on Channel 4’s betting commentator John McCririck at Newmarket on Thursday. The strong impression remains that players are expected to be no more than acquiescent work-horses whose only role in life is to raise money for the game and the comfort of the administration.The club v country question is bad enough in football but it is not as potentially destructive as it is in rugby and we are just weeks away from a new season which will do everything to highlight the conflict and nothing to solve it.I suspect that, eventually, only a united effort by the players themselves will establish a seasonal structure in which they, their clubs and their countries can all flourish. Will Carling might well have been speaking for the majority of them when he made an impassioned plea at the AGM for Cliff Brittle not to be elected as chairman. They took no notice, of course, and we await signs that Brittle considers the interests of players at the elite level to be a priority.Whoever runs the RFU, or any of the home unions for that matter, the struggle between them and the clubs to control the availability of players is the most vital problem facing the game. Playing Australia had to be a commercial decision because there were few lessons to be learned particularly as the man who would learn most from those lessons, Jack Rowell, is under acute threat of the sack.What the players make of it all is difficult to say.

It was ironic that while England’s players were preparing to go over the top once more, the two factions fighting for control of the RFU were at each other’s throats at the annual meeting.If they’d held the AGM on the pitch at Twickenham, they could have sold enough tickets to match any income gained from sending their team to the other side of the world and it would have been much more entertaining and informative. The number forced to play on with pain-killing injections masking injuries does no credit to the sports concerned whose philosophy seems to be that anyone “requiring to be elsewhere” would need the support of a current death certificate.I am not making light of whatever is ailing John Daly but I warrant that many knackered Lions would have felt like informing the Rugby Football Union that among the experiences they required least after the physical and mental demands of their triumphant South African tour was an immediate visit to Australia to face a bunch of slavering Wallabies.Rugby has rapidly become a most difficult sport for a top player to find a balanced approach to his professional life and the events of the last 48 hours have served to emphasise the game’s problems. At times, even a lack of fitness is not sufficient excuse for absence from the front line. It is not a coincidence that in golf and tennis particularly the players are represented by associations strong enough to be an integral part of the game’s government and mindful of the best interests of their members.Those who earn their living in games run by autocratic, not to mention anachronistic, bodies face almost feudal obligations to their paymasters. The only comparable sports where individuals have this kind of freedom are tennis and, to a lesser extent, athletics. Top players can, by and large, pick and choose where and when they play. This may depend on a whim or on how much appearance money is being offered to them merely for turning up.Few other professionals are able to indulge themselves in such a luxury.