Author: Tim Adams
Publication: The Observer
Date: November 28, 2004
URL: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1361380,00.html
We should be as loth to send our
cricketers to Pakistan as we are to send them to Zimbabwe
In exactly a year's time, the England
cricket team starts a winter tour of Pakistan. In the latest report from
Human Rights Watch, General Musharraf's regime is accused of routinely
brutalising - and sometimes murdering - the 10,000 farmers of the Punjab
who refuse to give up their land to the military government; of systematically
harassing and imprisoning opposition politicians; and of torturing journalists
who criticised the military, including Rasheed Hazam, who has been hung
upside down and beaten during two years in high security detention for
publishing a photograph of army personnel engaged in 'crowd control'.
Given that test cricket now seems
to be our most potent weapon in efforts to 'send a powerful message' to
'vile dictators', we can presumably expect a comparable amount of hand-wringing
when the English team sets off for Islamabad as has marked its delayed
arrival in Harare. Derek Pringle and his fellow sportswriters will no doubt
refuse to set foot on Pakistani soil unless they are allowed to write fully
and freely about the country's nuclear programme, while the Foreign Office
will clearly want to use the matches as a crude tool to denounce the brutalities
of the host regime.
Or will the fact that General Musharraf's
government is not only a repressive dictatorship to equal Robert Mugabe's
but also an ally in the war on terror mean that Flintoff and the rest will
be able to play their cricket without being made to feel they are the final
hope for the free world?
Blair's easy ride
Before this week, the last time
the idea of impeachment cropped up in the Palace of Westminster was in
1785. On that occasion, a formidable trio of Whig radicals - the playwright
Sheridan, the great constitutionalist Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox,
the most brilliant orator of his day - pressed criminal charges against
Warren Hastings, the returning governor of India. Hastings was cited on
22 instances of 'tyrannical or arbitrary conduct' in pursuing Britain's
imperial aims. He subsequently spoke in parliament without interruption
for a day and a half, defending in detail his foreign adventures, and then
fought a ruinous seven-year legal battle in the House of Lords.
It is fair to say that the cast
of characters who proposed to move a similar charge against Tony Blair's
arbitrary conduct in Iraq - and who could happily swap roles with the sad
crew dispatched to the jungle for I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!
- are unlikely to inspire such a rigorous defence. The problem with the
anti-war movement is that its most vociferous proponents are often raving
self-publicists. Faced with a line- up that includes pot-boiling conspiracy
theorist Frederick Forsyth, cigar-chomping litigator George Galloway, and
several Redgraves, the Prime Minister will no doubt believe that he can
fob them off with a short text message along the lines of one he sent to
a 'young person' questioning him on a radio 'WAP phone-in' this week. Wondering
about the role of intelligence in the current conflict, Blair stood by
his belief that 'the security services r doing a great job'.
Wayne's world
Not before time, two distinguished
academics - one a fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge - have set themselves
the task of deconstructing that most impacted and slippery of linguistic
challenges, 'the Lexicon of Football'. In doing so, they have provided
valuable insight into the nuance of such mysterious phrases as 'play host'
- which is 'a verb like "entertain" or "welcome" in the thesaurus of those
who relay cup draws who want to avoid just saying versus all the time'
- or 'virtual spectator' - which is, of course, 'how the goalkeeper of
the dominant side should be described'.
The great debate over the architectural
merits of Wayne Rooney's new house - either (for the Guardian ) a 'neo-neo
Georgian' monstrosity 'vaguely reminiscent of a supermarket' or, according
to Simon Jenkins, a classical home 'full of references to Palladio's Vetruvian
revival' - provided several new additions to the footballing language.
Not least of these is 'Rooney's study', loosely defined as 'that essential
space - between indoor gym and snooker room - to which millionaire teenage
footballers retire after a local derby to read Dostoevsky and listen to
the Third Programme'.
Mostly, you imagine, this could
be employed as a term of managerial abuse as in: 'He's about as much use
as Rooney's study.'
· In last week's column Richard
Ingrams expressed surprise that Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph,
hadn't given evidence in the Galloway trial. It turns out that he did,
but Galloway's lawyers chose not to cross-examine him. Apologies to Mr
Moore.
· Richard Ingrams is away
