What’s cricket and what’s not: the secret sporting history of Tony Blair
Iused to play for the same cricket club as Tony Blair, though not at the same time. It was called the Cricket Pistols, named after the punk rock band which is still indelibly associated in the public mind with the names Johnny Rotten and the late Sid Vicious. My own association with the Pistols was comparatively brief. They were affable, faintly druggie types, many of whom had attended Cambridge university, and in some cases completed their degrees. At least one had spent time in borstal. The Pistols were fairly down at heel then, but have since made good and tend to live in large houses in Notting Hill Gate.
Tony Blair used to turn out occasionally about 25 years ago, when he was establishing himself as a barrister but before he became an MP. I can’t remember exactly why he played for the side. Perhaps he had represented one of the Pistols in court. I have a memory, however, that Charles Howard, the captain, shared chambers with Cherie Booth and that may have been the connection. Howard told me that Tony Blair consistently bought his round of drinks in the pub after (and indeed before) the game, a thoroughly commendable trait that can by no means be relied upon among occasional members of itinerant cricket clubs. The future prime minister, added Howard, was an enthusiastic fielder who did not bowl and was a sketchy lower middle order bat.
The curious thing is that neither Tony Blair nor his media handlers have ever made anything of this fragmentary but nevertheless genuine connection with cricket. This is uncharacteristic. Their usual procedure is to make the most of the most meagre materials in order to construct any account of events which might induce a sense of connection with the electorate. For instance, Tony Blair once informed readers of Country Life that he was ‘brought up, really’ in the country. As his biographer John Rentoul sternly comments, ‘This was not true “really” or even at all. His main childhood home was on an estate of private houses on the outskirts of Durham City.’ Football is another case in point. Unlike cricket, there is no evidence that the Prime Minister has any genuine connection with football at all. And yet a vast industry was long ago set to work inside Downing Street to magnify the Prime Minister’s love of the game. He was filmed in the park playing with his ‘kids’. There were photo opportunities with leading players and, once, with the shortlived England manager Kevin Keegan. The thuggish Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was converted into a New Labour icon. He, too, was filmed kicking a ball with the Prime Minister, donated money to the party, helped out in New Labour campaigns, and was awarded a knighthood in return.
Tony Blair has gone out of his way to give his exiguous connection with football a weight and significance out of all proportion with the reality, while making nothing of his past as a cricketer. Had my old friends in the Cricket Pistols been footballers, some of them might have been national figures by now. The Downing Street press office would have pressed their names, along with telephone numbers, upon writers of magazine profiles so that they could provide recollections of Tony Blair the midfield dynamo or whatever.
Tony Blair’s spin doctors concluded from the start that the New Labour brand must be associated with football, but not cricket. They enforced a rule upon New Labour politicians that they must be interested in football. It has been adhered to rather more strictly than the ministerial code of conduct. This accounts in part for the embarrassing laddish culture that still permeates the government and disturbs women ministers.
And yet there is a paradox here. For cricket — as we have all witnessed in the course of this wonderful summer — is about the things which Tony Blair most professes to admire: civility, decency, tolerance, comradeship, good manners, ‘respect’. Football, on the other hand, tolerates the two things that Tony Blair affects to despise: greed and selfishness. Alex Ferguson, that great New Labour hero, is an especially acute manifestation of this. He habitually encourages his players to put club before country. He fosters team spirit by creating a sense of isolation and even hatred of the outside world. Modern football allows a quite breathtaking selfishness, vulgarity and personal cupidity which goes far beyond even the caricature of 1980s Thatcherite individualism.
But this contrast in values has no relevance to a government based — to use Anthony Barnett’s dazzling phrase — on manipulative populism. For such a government, football is a perfect instrument. It delivers a naive, manipulated audience controlled by big moneyed interests. It provides the illusion, but not the reality, of popular engagement.
There is a metaphor here which goes far towards explaining the baffling tragedy of Tony Blair and the failure of New Labour. The concern for artifice has deprived both the Prime Minister and the government of any internal coherence or true authenticity. I dare say that Tony Blair, like me, loved his afternoons with the Pistols as they meandered round the villages of southern England. He surely enjoyed the sense of order which the sport of cricket temporarily imposed upon the ragged lives of his fellow players, the elaborate courtesies to opponents, the deep-rooted ceremony of the game. Yet he has never wanted to own up to any of this, as if it was a squalid private secret. Equally, I dare say he loathes the barbarism, money worship and sheer ugliness of much of modern football. But he would never say so.
I suspect New Labour has always regarded cricket, quite wrongly, as a Tory sport: stuck in the past, unfashionable, obsessed with uniforms and rules, traditional, with no mass appeal and — the worst crime of all — unsuccessful. The government’s various attempts to define ‘Britishness’ have never once invoked cricket, even though modern cultural historians today acknowledge its importance in the creation of a common national outlook in the second half of the 19th century. New Labour has never understood how deeply cricket achieves what it claims to be its own overriding objective, namely to provide a connection between individual and society. But this was once perfectly explained by the great Marxist cricket writer C.L.R. James. The confrontation between bowler and batsman, wrote James, ‘reproduces the central action which characterises all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less representative of a social group’.
That is why it would be grotesque to claim that cricket was a Tory sport. No newspaper has covered the game better than the Guardian, which nurtured the two greatest cricket-writing talents of the 20th century, James and Neville Cardus. No prime minister has loved the game more than Clem Attlee (though John Major and Sir Alec DouglasHome provide close competition). Cricket lovers can be anything — Marxist, Trot, Old Labour, even (like my grandfather) Scottish Nationalist. But New Labour feels acute unease about a game where the two chief spinners are called Shane Warne and Ashley Giles, not Campbell and Mandelson.
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