The other main Parties today chickened out of David Cameron’s volcanic soccer challenge.

The Labour Party’s Lord Adonis has levelled a very serious charge against David Cameron: he accused the Tory leader today of ‘playing political football’ with an erupting volcano. Living on the slopes of the bloody things is daring enough for most people, but now it seems Dave has the bottle to kick ’em around too.

You’d have thought a referee’s pitch inspection would be enough to get the game postponed, but Cameron’s insistence that a bit of lava flow was neither here nor there is evidence enough for me: he must be the man to guide us through this appalling crisis. I hear that he’s challenged Gordon to a ‘double or quits’ game, even telling the Labour leader that he can play downhill both halves, and the Tories will tie their defence’s legs together and still give those State School wimps a damn good thrashing.

We’ve yet to hear from Mr Brown on this offer: his needle is still stuck in the groove of ‘I have no style or presentation skills, but I have substance’. But since The Surge, we never have to wait long for Nick Clegg’s view: not for him the easy Abe Lincoln option of saying some things to all the People part of the time: the LibDem X-Factor finalist will say everything to everyone about anything. His mouth is open so often, he has an aide following him full-time to apply sun protection to his tongue.

Nick is enjoying his new role as patronising political umpire, and is thus the obvious choice to referee the Brown v Cameron decider, should it ever come off. Volcanic ash, he declared, should not become a Party political issue. But what does this mean: he’ll referee on an Ash surface, but he draws the line at dangerously viscous lava? If so, then he will be unmasked as a man who has funked the question of the day: is he merely as popular as Churchill was by 1945? Or does he have the bulldog spirit of Winnie in 1940?

I was surprised at first that the Greens were so quiet on the issue of our airspace being full of nasty bits of igneous stuff: I half-expected to see a surgette in their support, and lots of yah-boo-we-told-you-so. But now I understand why they’ve been so low-key. After all, it’s a tricky issue for them when Gaia suddenly fights back, but shows itself to be a worse pollutant than the entire airline industry. Mouthing off in that context is a hostage to the likelihood that some bright spark will observe that the planes are all grounded, but the air’s still full of shit. Or it could just be that they didn’t fancy taking up Cameron’s volcanic soccer challenge. We will probably never know.

Personally, I think if an eruption disrupts the travel plans of campaigning politicians, then it’s asking to become a political issue. Tony Blair is stuck in Israel, and not many English MPs got up to the North and Scotland this week: how much more political can a volcano get? But lest we forget, the original whinge of Lord Adonis was that turning volcanoes into a political football game was not on. What the peer actually said was “It is just really so unfair, but it’s my ball and I’m taking it home so there”.

If you take the name Adonis, you really shouldn’t say stuff like that – even if I did make the second half of the statement up.