The Hurricane and the poodle

Watching the fascinating and entertaining tribute documentary Alex Higgins: The People's Champion just reminded me how much of a force of nature he was. The nickname "Hurricane" was well chosen - arrogant, erratic, brilliant, self-destructively alcoholic - it's all there.

I was at an Alex Higgins snooker match at the Wembley Conference Centre in 1987, where he came from behind to beat Terry Griffiths 5-4 in true determined Higgins fashion, but the end of the match was marred by an overbearing fan who leapt onto the stage to congratulate his hero.

That sort of entourage often dogged and characterised Higgins: if he was the People's Champion then I would liked him to have behaved more like one of them than the self-destructive rebel without a cause he often seemed. Nonetheless, he comes across as a very genuine human being, unlike Tony Blair, whose much anticipated biography was accompanied by a BBC1 interview with Andrew Marr yesterday. I found it a depressing example of how the transition from leader of the opposition to Prime Minister can become sadly coercive to establishment views and dangerously subversive to political bias across the Atlantic in America.

On the television today I noticed was also an old classic 1950's political drama on BBC2, All the King's Men starring Broderick Crawford as an ambitious politician who works his way up to Governor but gradually betrays all his principles to get there. The same could well apply to Tony Blair.