Not since I last tuned in to live coverage of Federal Parliament have I heard as much hot air as has been emitted over the ICC's rejection of John Howard's candidacy for its vice-presidency.

So John and Janette won't be able to tour the world on cricket's tab, and Australia and New Zealand have been forced to consider a new candidate. What a cock-up.

The first fault is the ICC's, for not stating the reasons six of its 10 members opposed Howard. Its silence has created a vacuum into which the conspiracy theories have poured.

A consensus of these theories, led by Malcolm Speed, the council's former CEO who was ousted by its murky manoeuvres and therefore has NO AXE TO GRIND, states that the ICC feared Howard's strong leadership and record of action against corruption. This theory has it that Zimbabwe led an Indo-Caribbeo-African coalition to keep Howard out because he might have kept them honest.

Fairfax's Peter Roebuck, who initially opposed Howard's candidacy on the grounds that Howard has far less knowledge of cricket than he's tried to pass off, became a Howard supporter when Zimbabwe's opposition to Howard emerged. For Roebuck, as for any decent observer, Mugabe's henchman Peter Chingoka represents a far greater evil than Howard, and if my enemy's enemy is my friend, then Howard becomes the hapless victim.

It's an indictment of the ICC that hardly anybody seems to have taken its action at face value. The ICC may not deserve it, based on past performance, but let's give it a try.

Howard has no background in cricket administration. Cricket Australia board member Harry Harinath, who has known Howard for 20 years, this week praised Howard's skills as an ‘administrator'. But whatever your view of the 11-year Howard government, the man was not an administrator. He was a politician. His indisputable skill was in shaping public opinion so that he could defefat his political opponents. You can only call a Prime Minister an ‘administrator' in the sense that you would call Eddy Groves a ‘childcare worker'. These guys operate at a different level. They are deal-makers, not administrators. As successful as Howard was in winning elections, it's hard to see how those skills could have been applied to the ICC vice-presidency, where, ironically, winning an election has been the hardest thing for him to achieve.

Howard gained the nomination in an unconventional way, when Australia scuttled the nomination of New Zealand's Sir John Anderson, who has more experience in cricket administration and would have been - indeed, may still be - acceptable to all nations. Cricket Australia had its reasons for doing this, which may be valid. But it can't then cry out for the protection of ‘convention' when the ICC does the unprecedented and votes down Howard. Australia was the instigator in defying convention by not allowing New Zealand to have its turn. From then, the ICC seems to have thought that the gloves were off.

The defeat has been humiliating for Australia, another sign of the shift in cricket's balance of power from Melbourne to Mumbai. This was the risk Cricket Australia and its allies were always taking when they put up an unprecedented, controversial nomination. CA was trying to take the bull by the horns, and the bull has duly thrown it on the ground and given it a good goring. Perhaps that was always going to happen. But by picking a fight, and losing, CA's loss of power has been exposed. It might regain its dignity in this matter by going back to where it started, doing what it should have done in the first place, and nominating Anderson.