The leading edge

Three out of the last ten prime ministers have been cricket fanatics. The first was Clement Attlee. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war a newswire service was installed in 10 Downing Street. Attlee ignored it except that during the summer months he used what he called his ‘cricket machine’ to keep up to date with the close-of-play scores.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home is the only prime minister so far to have played the first-class game, including two matches for Middlesex in the mid-1920s. After retiring as Tory leader, he became president of the MCC.

Finally we have John Major, a useful player before a crippling knee injury forced him to abandon the game. When he was at Downing Street, cabinet meetings would be interrupted by the latest scores. Cricket provided his only link to deadly critics such as John Redwood and Simon Heffer. Now he has become the first ex-prime minister to write a book about cricket.

More than a Game tells the story of the sport from its prehistory up to the end of the 19th century. It appears to be based on original research and makes audacious claims to independent scholarship. Major has the confidence to take on existing authorities. He is very firm, for example, on the contentious issue of early cricket in France. Rowland Bowen, probably the greatest historian of the game (to whose brilliant, path-breaking work Major makes no reference), maintained that cricket could be traced back to 15th-century Flanders and probably before, arguing that cricket had its origins in an old Celtic game in a form more primitive than anything we know now. Major will have none of this, asserting that this line of thought relies on textual misreadings.