Sol Campbell's transfer to the Tories could be what the Conservatives need to defend millionaires from the dreaded ‘mansion tax’

Campbell is following a venerable tradition of sporting heroes turned politicians

Sol Campbell near his home in Chelsea (Justin Sutcliffe)

With the coming election still impossibly hard to call, we look for signs of the butterfly effect – tiny gusts on the political breeze that might grow into a hurricane – and wonder whether a high-profile defection might prove the clincher. I refer not to past or future ship-jumpers to Ukip, but to the former England footballer Sol Campbell, who appears poised to play an electoral role in the Conservative interest.

Although Sol grew up in a staunchly Labour east London household (“as you get older, you get wiser,” he explains, “wiser” apparently being a synonym here for “richer”), the threat of a mansion tax has outraged him beyond endurance. Not only has it persuaded him to place his £25m Chelsea home on the market in the most eye-catching transfer since a certain Sol Campbell left Spurs for Arsenal; it has propelled him into Conservative arms.

The Sunday Times reports that he has held talks with the Sports minister Helen Grant “and other senior Tories” about a role as a “consultant or sporting ambassador, going on from there”. Going on to precisely where remains unclear, but the history of retired sports stars storming the political barricades makes it folly to underestimate him.

Idi Amin was Uganda’s light heavyweight boxing champion before acceding to the throne of Scotland. David Icke’s spell in goal for Coventry City was a stepping stone to his fondly remembered leadership of the Greens, the presidency of the Philippines is boxer Manny Pacquiao’s for the asking, and in Pakistan … well, Imran Khan just never gives up, does he?

The particular appeal of Sol, who has taken to shooting on the Yorkshire estate of his wife’s family, is his elegant straddling of social strata. “I understand what’s happening on the streets and in high society. It’s about bridging that gap and I can quite easily do that for the Government.” Indeed, indeed. We wish Sol well as he begins the march to power on the captivating East End Kids Made Good Against the Iniquitous Mansion Tax platform.

Lord Freud – always striving to help the disabled

A lively week for Louise Mensch, which began with her foreseeing an Ebola epidemic as the Tories’ best chance of a parliamentary majority, concluded with some richly deserved praise for David Freud. Many have defended his lordship for his strictures about cut-price wages for the disabled, but none as persuasively as Louise.

“The man has spent a lifetime trying to make things better for disabled folk,” she writes in The Sun on Sunday, and how exceedingly true that is. After waging a long campaign for disabled rights from the traditional bully pulpit of investment banking, Freud was hired by Labour in 2008 to mastermind the reform of the benefits system. From a starting position of absolute ignorance, he wrote his White Paper in three weeks and explained that he was astounded by how easy it was.

“We cannot have people simply loafing about, doing nothing and expecting the state to finance their lifestyles,” he declared, proselytising for the enchanting policy of having Atos interrogate people as to why disability and such trivial ailments as rheumatoid arthritis, clinical depression and terminal cancer were barriers to employment.

If Freud has a fault, it is Esther Rantzen Syndrome by proxy: he cares, if anything, too much. The sadness is that it was left to Louise to shame his critics by alerting them to his magnificent record in the field.

When was an election ever less likely to prove decisive?

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron delves into his stockroom of searingly original thoughts to identify the next election as “the most important for a generation”. Anyone who can cite any election since the era of Sir Robert Peel which was not widely trailed as such wins an all-expenses-paid surfing holiday to Cornwall (though, as usual, you’ll have to pay all the expenses yourself). Given the likelihood that the next election will be completely indecisive, and may well require a second within a year, à la 1974, it is far more likely to be the least important for several generations.

Katie and Francis: a beautiful friendship looms

Exciting news from West Sussex, where Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has sold his nine-bedroom house to a former neighbour. One can think of certain Tories (Oi, Nicholas Soames, I’m talking to you) who would have recoiled from handing their keys to Katie Price lest she transform their effortlessly tasteful home into a leopard-skin palace.

But Francis, who educated us about the distinction between a formal dinner and a “kitchen supper”, is famously the least snobby of his breed. Whether he’ll be nipping back to his old gaff for a reunion country supper with Katie remains to be seen. But it’s nice to imagine that this will be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

A national treasure washed clean

Whatever the future holds for Sol Campbell, he will never be as adored a sporting-political figure as Geoffrey Boycott. One minute it’s Theresa May banging on about how Boycs was her childhood idol, the next David Cameron mock-apologises to him for describing William Hague as the greatest living Yorkshireman … and now Ed Miliband gets in on the act.

In the same Times interview in which he made his fantasy-land commitment to test for all cancers within a week, Little Ed revealed: “I have a rather unlikely friendship with Geoff Boycott.” You wonder whether he and the others would brag of their love if Boycott had a conviction from an English court for badly beating up a girlfriend in a hotel room. He does have one in France, of course, but that’s a faraway country of which we know little, and clearly doesn’t matter a jot.