Tagalog

Botham - we'll call him that rather than Sir Ian or, more recently, Lord Botham - has been appointed the UK's trade envoy to Australia. If anything is designed to get up the noses of the Aussies, it's shoving Botham down their throats. How this will influence the prospects of a free trade deal, who knows?

Trade envoys are parliamentarians - yes people, Botham is a member of our revered Upper House - appointed, unpaid, by the Prime Minister of the day. There are currently 36 trade envoys covering 76 countries/regions. Most of them - in fact, all of them other than Botham - are people you've never heard of. One imagines that they have some connection with, or experience of, their target territories. Richard Graham, MP for Gloucester, for instance, speaks Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, French, Malay and Swahili; so a decent enough fit as trade envoy to the ASEAN Economic Community of Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. Not sure where they speak Tagalog; could it be a fictional language like Dothraki or Klingon? Nope, it's a Filipino language. I picked it up quite quickly:

The trade envoy programme only began in 2012. It's aims are to "support the drive for economic growth by building on the UK’s existing relations with these markets and maximising bilateral trade, thereby generating real and long term benefits for the UK." It's fair to assume there will be more trade envoys appointed in due course. If they follow the example of sending a cricketer to the country that he battered into submission with his determination, we might see the following:

Geoff Hurst (hat-trick in the World Cup Final victory over West Germany 1966) as envoy to Germany.

Andy Murray (beat Novak Djokovic to win Wimbledon singles final 2013) as envoy to Serbia.

Trina Gulliver (beat Francis Hoenselaar to win the darts world championships in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007) as envoy to The Netherlands.

Laura Davies (US Women's Open Golf champion 1987, beating Ayako Okamoto and JoAnne Carner) as envoy to Japan and the USA.

Stand by your phones, people!