At the Hay Festival to talk about what the event’s website terms ‘the systemic biases’ of cricket, Stephen Fry, the celebrated comedian, said of MCC: “It has a public face that is deeply disturbing, sort of beetroot-coloured gentlemen in yellow and orange blazers sitting in this space in front of the Long Room and looking as if they’d come out of an Edwardian cartoon.” We must wait to see how the club’s members react to being so described by Mr Fry – for myself, not owning a club blazer (they do admittedly make one look a little like the death-watch beetle) nor being notably beetroot, I felt he must be talking about somebody else. Some of my fellow members, however, will be less than amused, and will wonder what on earth Mr Fry is doing.
It is not just bad manners in any club to attack one’s fellow members in public; it is a far higher degree of insult to do so when you are a man whom the club had chosen just two years ago for the considerable honour of being its president. Mr Fry said he felt that the club ‘stinks’ of ‘privilege and classicism’ as if we MCC types sit in the stands chatting to each other in Latin about our landed estates. It is far too superficial to ask why Mr Fry (a highly intelligent man whom I know and admire) ever agreed to become a member of a club he found so despicable, let alone to agree to become its president. He must realise that by caricaturing its membership so he is engaging in an act of prejudice. He is just as foolish as those who take the example of one person of colour and attach all sorts of failings to everyone else of colour. Mr Fry would, I imagine, deplore such an ignorant attitude, and so he cannot be too surprised that people deplore his remarks about his fellow members of MCC.
His apparently self-hating observations came in a discussion triggered by the imminent publication of a book by Azeem Rafiq, who prompted an earthquake at Yorkshire when he accused various former team-mates there of racism – including my colleague Michael Vaughan, against whom nothing could be proved. Only one, Gary Ballance, admitted bad behaviour, and apologised. Hay’s website trumpets the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket report, which (as one look at its composition showed) was a form of self-fulfilling prophecy and concluded (in the festival’s words) ‘that cricket is riddled with structural and institutional racism, sexism, classism and elitism.’ Also on the panel was Claire Taylor, the former England women’s cricketer.
No-one supports or defends racism in cricket, and anyone found practising it at any level in the game should be barred from their club immediately. Apparently the same abhorrence does not exist towards those who wish to insult someone’s class (middle or above, and tending towards the professions), gender (male), age (middle or above, again) and educational background (elite), something which, as Mr Fry is aware, few had any say over. MCC is a club of a certain demographic because it is people from that demographic who for the last 30 or 40 years have predominantly played cricket, thanks to its near-destruction in a state school system by those with whose politics the militant anti-racists are in sympathy.
Calling MCC members names perhaps got Mr Fry a cheap laugh at Hay among his fellow guilt-laden elite, but it does nothing to heal cricket’s self-inflicted wounds. The main barriers to ‘inclusion’ at MCC are a 25-year waiting list and a high annual subscription, not racism, elitism and classism. At least Rafiq had the grace to say that ‘middle-aged white men’ were the main people to support him when he made his accusations; though some of those accusations did not stand up. Rafiq himself was outed for anti-semitic tweets, showing that even he is not perfect when it comes to matters of race. His book is eagerly awaited, though not perhaps for the reasons he would wish, and various of his former colleagues’ lawyers are watching.
It appears even the England and Wales Cricket Board has decided that more harm than good is being done in the game by running witch-hunts for so-called ‘racists’. Accusations at Essex have been refuted; Yorkshire, despite a serious rescue effort from former MCC President Philip Hodson and ex-ECB chairman Colin Graves, is still not entirely back on its feet, and political grandstanding and virtue-signalling by anyone prominent in the game is solely destructive. The sooner those with a high profile in the game stop looking for reasons to flagellate themselves over race, and start making a constructive effort for everyone in the world of cricket to get on with each other and behave decently towards each other, the better.