Lord Macaulay’s apt but hackneyed observation that “we know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality” hardly suffices to describe the dangerous nonsense of the matter of whether Michael Vaughan, a dozen years ago, referred to four Yorkshire players of Pakistani origin as “you lot”.
Probably 99 per cent of the British public couldn’t care less whether he did or not. The one per cent that could includes those for whom an Orwellian blame-culture and a career of nauseating self-righteousness have become an addictive way of life. Why an entire sport should flagellate itself for the gratification of such people (and it is increasingly about them, and less about players who allegedly endured racial abuse), and why a man who gave distinguished service to his county and his country as a batsman and captain and, lately, as a commentator should find himself undergoing a secular crucifixion before anything has been proved against him will leave most rational people astonished.
Ashley Giles, England’s managing director, has alluded to this injustice in remarks about the difference between zero tolerance of racism (not that any such charge has been proved against Vaughan) and zero tolerance of ‘racists’, many of whom may not be racists at all, but just foolish idiots who need to grow up. It is only sad that he appears to have made a rod for his own back by allowing Joe Root to stop any Ashes Test where a racist remark is heard from the crowd. Will play stop because one person of white Anglo-Saxon origin has called another a ‘Pommy b——’? I know Haseeb Hameed may be playing, but we are all becoming absurdly hyper-sensitive.
I must say two things for the avoidance of doubt. First, anyone who thinks there is a place in cricket at any level – from the Test arena down to the village green – for racial abuse or discrimination should be told to shut up or be driven out of the game. The future of cricket depends on all who wish to play it being welcomed into its fold. They should feel they are being judged, as members of a cricket team, on their character and their ability. It is as simple as that. If Vaughan thought differently he would have no place in cricket, and a shadow would be cast over his conspicuous achievements; but it is obvious, from what he has said adamantly and repeatedly since the Rafiq affair blew up, that he thinks nothing of the sort.
The second point I must make is that although Vaughan and I have had the honour to write about cricket for the Telegraph for several years, we have never met nor corresponded. The points I make about him and his treatment I make as a cricket lover and, sadly, as a seasoned observer of politics, and not because we owe each other anything as members of the same branch of freemasonry.
I strongly believe that by any objective standards the persecution of Vaughan by the BBC and BT, who were both due to carry his broadcast analysis this winter before he was cancelled, has become an outrage. Monty Panesar, in his excellent column for the Telegraph last Saturday, noted the violation of the ancient precept of innocence until proven guilty. I draw the attention of Vaughan’s persecutors to the observations of Panesar, as a man of colour, about his friend’s and former captain’s track record of working with and developing the careers of players from ethnic-minority backgrounds.
One wonders what Vaughan, having been found guilty without trial by both the BBC and BT, having his livelihood put at risk and having been consigned to that abysmal rank of society peopled by ‘racists’, must now do to restore his reputation. He has no recollection of having referred to his Asian team-mates as “you lot”. And why should he? Either he didn’t say it, or if he did it was a tasteless joke that meant so little to him that he can’t remember it.
How many of us can remember much, indeed anything, in joshing with close colleagues 11 or 12 years ago? If Vaughan said it or something like it – and there being no tape recording of the incident, we shall never know – was it a vicious racist remark designed to belittle, humiliate and degrade those at whom it was aimed to the point where they felt they were being driven out of professional cricket? Or was it an ironic remark teasing them about the overdue arrival of gifted players from the Indian sub-continent into the Yorkshire side? Objectively, such a remark, however hurtful, does not begin to compare with any act of wickedness in the history of slavery or the Holocaust.
But perspective means nothing to the zealots in cases such as this. Vaughan is, in the eyes of those who live to signal their own questionable virtue, a man who must take his place in the annals of iniquity with 18th-century slavers.
What would satisfy the BBC and BT to re-employ Vaughan? Would crawling from Headingley to Lord’s on a carpet of red-hot cinders while whipping himself with barbed wire suffice, having, of course, agreed to confess to something he sincerely believes he did not do?
