Sidhu hits parliament for six

I discover today that the MP for the nearby city of Amritsar is Navjot Singh Sidhu – the Indian opening batsman turned TV commentator, famous for tonking John Emburey for nine sixes in a match. This is an intriguing thought for anyone familiar with Sidhu’s commentary, where he played just as many shots as on the field.

So has he yet told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as he once told a fellow commentator on air: “You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg”. Or that, like the former Indian wicketkeeper Deep Dasgupta, the governing Congress Party is “as confused as a child in a topless bar”?

It comes as little surprise that Sidhu represents the conservative and nationalist BJP party. Most cricketers, if they think much about politics at all, seem to tend in that direction. Of course there are currents that cut across that generalisation. Bob Willis added the middle name Dylan by deed poll, in tribute to the 1960s and ‘70s hero of the left, Bob. The Indian slow bowler Palwankar Baloo stood for the socialist Congress Party before the War and was a great champion of the lower castes. Henry Blofeld (17 first-class games for Cambridge University), may, as Matthew Engel once wrote, be a member of the Norfolk branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party in very deep cover.

But the known facts point in a different direction. ‘Lord’ Ted Dexter stood as a Tory candidate in the 1964 election, where he was well beaten in Cardiff South-East by the future Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan. The Conservative Prime Minister of the 1960s, Alec Douglas Home, played first-class cricket as a right-arm quickish bowler. Ian Botham was an avid fan of Margaret Thatcher. (And is virtually the only man known to have stopped Tony Blair’s former aide Alastair Campbell in his tracks, memorably telling a bewildered Campbell that “his lot” knew “nothing about the countryside”.) Going further back, the Test players FS Jackson and Lord Harris served in Tory governments. (Though no cricketer I know of approached the views of the 1970s tennis player Buster Mottram, who once said “I hope Enoch Powell will never die, just as his namesake in the Bible never died”, and later had a brief dalliance with the National Front.)

Perhaps it comes from belief in the possibility of self-improvement: “If I can pull myself up to the top, then the rest of you can manage it too.” Perhaps cricketers just don’t like the taxman. And I don’t know how any of them vote, so I may have got it wrong. But I’d put my house on the constituency of English County Cricket returning a man in a blue rosette.