The justice and security bill will have a corrosive impact on individual rights.

I'm leaving the Liberal Democrats too

The justice and security bill will have a corrosive impact on individual rights. The party's support for it is a coalition compromise too far

• 
• • Philippe Sands
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 March 2013 20.30 GMT

Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Jo Shaw announces her resignation during a speech at the party's spring conference. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images

I have worked closely with the Liberal Democrats since the attacks of 11 September; it has been the only party to adopt a principled and consistent position favouring the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. In difficult times, and in the face of blanket claims invoking risks to national security, the Liberal Democrats have resisted policies embracing torture, rendition and the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists without charge, as well as war under conditions of patent illegality.

After the London attacks of July 2005 the Lib Dems stood firm against the idea that the "rules of the game" had changed, committed to respect of human rights for all. They opposed executive authority, secrecy and the rise of the "security state". In government, on many issues, that position has been maintained. But to my great regret, last week the parliamentary group was whipped to vote in favour of the introduction of secret court hearings in part 2 of the justice and security bill. If adopted, the bill will put British judges in the invidious position of adjudging certain civil claims under conditions in which one party will not be entitled to see the evidence on which the opposing party relies. Last year Lib Dem members voted overwhelmingly against this. They did so again at their conference on Sunday. Their approach was informed, reasonable, principled and correct. Why was it ignored?

This part of the bill is a messy and unhappy compromise. It is said to have been demanded by the US (which itself has stopped more or less any case that raises 'national security' issues from reaching court), on the basis that it won't share as much sensitive intelligence information if the UK doesn't rein in its courts. Important decisions on intelligence taken at the instigation of others are inherently unreliable. We remember Iraq, which broke a bond of trust between government and citizen.

There is no floodgate of cases, nothing in the coalition agreement, nor any widely supported call for such a draconian change. There is every chance that, if the bill is adopted, this and future governments will spend years defending the legislation in UK courts and Strasbourg. There will be claims that it violates rights of fair trial under the Human Rights Act and the European convention (no doubt giving rise to ever-more strident calls from Theresa May and Chris Grayling that both should be scrapped). Other countries with a less robust legal tradition favouring the rule of law and an independent judiciary will take their lead from the UK, as they did with torture and rendition.

I accept that there may be times when the country faces a threat of such gravity and imminence that the exceptional measure of closed material proceedings might be needed. This is not such a time, and the bill is not such a measure. Under conditions prevailing today, this part of the bill is not pragmatic or proportionate. It is wrong in principle, and will not deliver justice. It will be used to shield governmental wrongdoing from public and judicial scrutiny under conditions that are fair and just. The bill threatens greater corrosion of the rights of the individual in the UK, in the name of "national security".

It smells too of political compromise in the name of coalition politics. Being a party of government does not mean such compromise is inevitable. This is particularly important now, as Conservative forces ratchet up their attacks on rights for all and against the European convention. At this moment the need for the Liberal Democrats to stand firm on issues of principle – for individual rights and open justice, against the security state – is greater than ever.

Secrecy begets secrecy. I have listened to all the arguments, and concluded this is a compromise too far, neither necessary nor fair at this time. The point has been made eloquently in recent days by Dinah Rose QC and Jo Shaw. Their principled arguments have long had my full support and so I have joined them in resigning from the Liberal Democrats. I have done so with regret, given the courageous positions adopted on these issues by Charles Kennedy, Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg in the past. I still hope that the views of the membership might yet prevail, before the bill passes into law. If not, the Liberal Democrats will have lost integrity on one issue that has truly distinguished them from other parties, and on which they can rightly claim to have made a real difference.

Vicky pays the Pryce

What makes Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce so compelling is that we all live on the brink of disaster

Chris Huhne was sent to prison today. But if his fall from grace seems remote from anything that might happen in our own lives, we should think again.

In my experience all of us, at any stage, are potentially just a few steps from disaster. It takes no more than a handful of bad decisions to reach the point that events are out of our control and disaster overtakes us.

It's not unusual

Mr Huhne’s decisions to speed and to cover up his offence, were not unusual. Up to 300,000 of us may have persuaded others to take our penalty points for speeding, according to a survey for the AA in 2011. However, once Mr Huhne rejected his wife and forfeited her loyalty, his ability to control events passed out of his hands. The disaster that followed was entirely predictable.

As a lawyer specialising in criminal law, the point that strikes me over and over again is how close we all are to the disaster of a criminal investigation and trial, whatever our background or circumstances.  We are all capable of committing crimes. It takes very little - a moment of temptation, a rush of anger, a reckless impulse - to commit many crimes.  Then all that stands between us and a criminal conviction is discovery, investigation and trial. 

Goethe once said that there was no crime of which he did not deem himself capable.  Most of us will understand the sense of what he was saying even if we cannot sign up to the entire proposition.  In identifying with his thought, we do not condone acts of violence or dishonesty, we simply recognise our own capacity to fail.

So why do people who have every advantage in life – a happy family background, a decent education, a good job - commit crimes? Few of us with such a background set out to commit a crime. There is too much stopping us: we have grown up believing in, obeying, and benefiting from rules, and we have prospered. The fear of losing all we have is a strong motivator to obey the law. We spent much of our lives controlling our behaviour. 

It is when an event or set of circumstances occurs which causes us to lose control, or when we think that the risks are minimal, that the danger surfaces. People convicted of stealing from their employers often do so because the pressure of debt in their personal lives overwhelms them. They begin with a genuine intention to repay the money that they “borrow” when circumstances allow, but somehow this moment never arrives.

Losing control

Often people convicted of downloading indecent images commit their crimes because they cannot control their behaviour but they also convince themselves that they will never be caught. These cases rarely involve a single instance of criminality. Instead they begin with a single bad decision (to take from petty cash or look at an image), followed by a further decision which commits the individual to the path that they choose.

Then there are other factors in the mix that are particular to ourselves: our appetite for risk and the extent to which we think we can control events.

When Dominique Strauss Kahn approached the maid in his New York hotel room; when Jonathan Aitken announced he would begin a libel action to “cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country”; when Lord Archer sued the Daily Star for libel over allegations (subsequently proved to be true) that he had slept with a prostitute – they were spinning the dice but also, I suspect, taking the gamblers pleasure in doing so. They thought they could win.

It may be that the biggest risk-takers are also those most likely to take the bad decisions that lead to disaster. But we have all done things we regret which through happenchance never become known, or have compounded an error by our subsequent decisions. The Huhne case illustrates the additional danger of entrusting a secret to others.

Once that step has been taken, then all depends on their ability or willingness to continue the deception.

Primary school maths whiz kids are set up for life

Hamish McRae in The Independent

An important, if troubling, bit of research has just been published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, backed with some government money.

It shows that 10-year-olds who are good at mathematics earn significantly more once they reach their thirties than those who are not. The IFS took a large group of children born in April 1970, then looked at their maths and English scores 10 years later. Then, they looked at their earnings at the ages of 30, 34 and 38.

The findings showed that those who were in the top 15 per cent of maths scores at age 10, earned on average 7.3 per cent more at 30 – equivalent to £2,100 a year – than the child who scored the average in that class, even adjusting for all other factors. Those who did similarly well in English earned 1.9 per cent – or £550 – more than the middle-ranker. So, being good at English is helpful, but being good at maths is even better.

The IFS says this suggests that employers value maths skills and are prepared to bid for people who have them, and it therefore concludes that we need to invest more in lifting children's performance in maths.

This makes sense, but also carries the worry that if 10-year-olds happen to be bad at maths, they are disadvantaged through life. It would thus follow that having a bad maths teacher at primary school can really damage people's chances, while a great one can lift children up for the rest of their lives.

The task for educators is huge, and clear objectives are a help. But, if numeracy is more important in the job market than literacy, what conclusions should we draw?

Iraq War: 'we have to face the truth and admit we failed'

Andrew Gilligan, who reported from Baghdad throughout the invasion of Iraq, highlights the failures of the British military as well as those of the politicians.

British forces transfer authority over Basra to the Americans in 2009 Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Andrew Gilligan

10:00PM GMT 09 Mar 2013

On the last day of Britain’s combat mission to Iraq, 30 April 2009, we lowered the flag with characteristic verve and style. In the morning, at our base in Basra, there was a deeply affecting service in honour of our military dead. It took 29 minutes to read out all the names.

In the afternoon came a more upbeat ceremony. Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the defence staff, said British forces had made an “outstanding contribution to the transition of Iraq.” They pulled out, he said, with “their reputation intact.”

Brigadier Tom Beckett, commander of 20th Armoured Brigade, the British formation, said: “We leave knowing we have done our job, and done it well. We leave with our heads held high.”

Gordon Brown, the prime minister (though sadly too busy to make it down himself) had earlier said that British troops remained “the best in the world” and had made Iraq “a success story”. The leaders’ very need, of course, to say such things showed that they were no longer quite true.

The Basra event was telling in one other way. Newspapers and broadcasters had known about it for some time, but were strictly forbidden from even mentioning that it would take place until afterwards. If the victory ceremony has to be kept secret on security grounds, what does that tell you about the victory? 

Iraq was a huge blow to the moral and international standing of this country. It changed, probably permanently, the relationship between the people of Britain and their leaders. I, for one, can never see our government – or our feeble democratic institutions, which did so little to prevent the disaster – in quite the same light again.

But, less widely understood, Iraq was also a military humiliation for the UK. In the debacle that was the war, and above all the occupation which followed, one group of people – Britain’s military leadership — got off far too lightly. And because we never faced up to this, the humiliation continues, right now, in Afghanistan and in Whitehall. One cherished part of the country’s self-image – the power and reputation of our armed forces — is now at serious risk.

For years, the top brass has been essentially exempt from the kind of criticism dished out to other public-sector leaders. All the failings of Iraq and Afghanistan are blamed on conniving politicians or cheese-paring bureaucrats. But evidence from those conflicts shows some of our generals, admirals and air marshals to be rather too much like, say, NHS managers for comfort.

Iraq’s greatest disaster was not the deceit beforehand, or the brief phase of “major combat operations” which began 10 years ago next week. It was the occupation which followed. That was when the vast majority of victims — perhaps 190,000 of them – died. If the occupation had gone better, the politicians’ lies would have been forgiven by now. And it was during the occupation that Britain’s brass fell down on the job.

The key evidence is hundreds of pages of official interviews, conducted by the Army itself with those in charge of the operation. A full set of classified transcripts, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph in 2009, painted a disturbing picture of complacency and misjudgment at senior levels.

Major-General Graeme Lamb, commander of 3 Division in the first months of the occupation, told his interlocutors: “It is easy to become fixated by the enemy. Securing military victory over the enemy is probably not a reality.”

Instead, Lamb favoured “soft effects,” such as improving the lives of the local people, which “really wasn’t that difficult and didn’t require that many experts. Once you knew what you needed to do, you then dispatched the nearest captain with the 'find me 100 trucks’ order and it all worked.”

With apologies to Lamb — who went on to high command in Afghanistan — the enemy surely was quite important. And sending out a captain with a hundred trucks did not “all work”. Basra’s infrastructure remained in ruins, partly because there were not “that many experts” — indeed any at all – and because security was never satisfactorily tackled by the British.

Instead, the British preferred to make deals with the enemy, the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia commanded by Muqtada Sadr. In the classified interviews, Major-General Andrew Stewart, the overall British commander, described how he “evaded” and “refused” American orders to confront Sadr, saying: “I was trying to achieve the same result through different means – trying to neutralise Sadr through the use of local Iraqis and succeeding.”

He did not succeed. Sadr was not a solution to the insecurity, but its key source. By 2006, Basra was in anarchy. By the following year, the policy of negotiation had led Britain to what was essentially a surrender. To the intense frustration of many British officers, we secretly signed a deal that we would not enter Basra in return for a promise that Sadr’s forces would stop attacking us.

It kept the body count down, which was all that mattered in London. But it also abandoned Basra to the Mahdi Army, who swaggered through the streets closing down video shops and enforcing headscarves on women.

The tragedy — as many of the classified interviewees recognised – was that Britain’s part of Iraq, the Shia south, was not like the centre of the country. Brutalised by Saddam, Iraqi Shias supported the invasion and might have been prepared to back the occupation. But Britain’s failure to improve infrastructure and security alienated them.

It is true that, by the time we left, the situation in Basra had dramatically improved. But that was due to an Iraqi- and US-led military offensive, Charge of the Knights, in which we took virtually no part.

Constrained by their surrender agreement, the British, theoretical guardians of Basra, stayed in their secure base on the outskirts until the closing moments, as the Iraqis and Americans drove the Mahdi Army out of town. By that stage, such was both nations’ contempt for Britain that they didn’t even tell us they were coming until the last minute.

Of course, you could say that without enough troops, and without enough political commitment, the British Army made the only choice it could. That is one of the reasons why Mr Blair’s deceits beforehand ended up mattering so much: because he could not admit he was planning a war, the forces could not prepare properly for either it or the aftermath. And afterwards, public disgust at the lies sapped will to resource the occupation.

As it happens, the military leadership was culpable there, too. In the run-up to the war, top-level figures in the defence establishment privately told journalists, including me, of their scepticism that Saddam was a serious threat. None was ever prepared to go on the record. Only in their memoirs — or at the Chilcot inquiry, when a stampede of brass wore out the carpets to dump on Blair – did the public learn of these brave warriors’ doubts.

Nor, with one or two exceptions, did they speak out against the years of disastrous procurement and kit that contributed to Britain’s Basra reckoning. Some soldiers only had five rounds of ammunition. The very first British casualty of the war, Sergeant Steven Roberts, died because his unit didn’t have enough body armour.

^{Sergeant Steven Roberts from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was the first British armed forces personnel to be killed in the Gulf War in 2003.}

Underlying the failed Basra strategy, too, was a flawed British assumption that they were good at counter-insurgency. We understand the natives, the generals would tell you — unlike those brutal, clumsy Americans. But smiles and handshakes could never alone have worked. Even previous peace support operations, such as Bosnia, had only been resolved by the use, or threat, of sufficient force.

The Americans were indeed appallingly brutal, to begin with, but they learned, and they changed — and, unlike us, they didn’t give up. They did surge men and resources; and in the end, helped by the overreach of their enemies, they did at least in part prevail. Both countries suffered political humiliation in Iraq. But only Britain was defeated militarily.

The clear lesson from Iraq was that you should do something properly, or not at all. But in Afghanistan, Britain’s generals repeated the same half-baked, penny-packet approach, the same self-delusion about their rapport with the locals, and drew the same contempt from their American allies.

General Benjamin Freakley, the main US commander in southern and eastern Afghanistan at the beginning of Britain’s campaign, admits that he was “scathing” to the British about their efforts in Helmand province. He said he warned especially strongly against Britain’s “disastrous” tactic of sending small groups of soldiers to far-flung “platoon houses,” sitting ducks for the Taliban. The practice was finally changed, but not before dozens of British lives were needlessly lost. These were operational decisions, nothing to do with British politicians — some of whom, indeed, were aghast at their generals’ recklessness.

The irony of Iraq is that an operation intended to strengthen the Anglo-US “special relationship,” the bar to which the British diplomatic and military establishment so desperately clings, did the exact opposite.

Basra cost us much respect in the Pentagon. In the leaked Iraq interview transcripts, the British brass complain that the overall US commander, General Rick Sanchez, never visited and never called: he didn’t, they complained, even install a secure phone link with them. Britain’s chief of staff, Colonel JK Tanner, likened the Americans to “a group of Martians”, saying: “Despite our so-called 'special relationship,’ I reckon we were treated no differently to the Portuguese.”

Soon, in Afghanistan, we will declare victory and leave. But it seems unlikely that we will leave much lasting trace of our presence, or much in return for the 440 British lives so far sacrificed there. And unlike the politicians of Iraq, the generals have moved on, reputations unsullied, to more lucrative work.

General Lamb, for instance, has recently taken to the media, extravagantly praising a dictatorial Arab regime which paid his lobbying company £1.5 million to “support [its] stance before the international community”. The Iraq war sandblasted the credibility of the British government, the intelligence agencies, and the diplomatic corps. But with the forces there is still, perhaps, an unwillingness among the media and public to confront reality; still a strong wish to believe that Britain is the best, the undefeated.

But for the sake of the self-respect and the very future of those forces, still among the proudest assets of this country, it is essential that they, and we, face the truth and learn the lessons.

The secret of Hugo Chavez

Grace Livingstone in The Independent

When I was a history student, I always wished I could hear one of the great orators of our time, a man or a woman who could sway a crowd and change the course of events with the power of their rhetoric. So I felt lucky to see Hugo Chavez, the revolutionary president of Venezuela, speak many times in Caracas.

What immediately struck you was his wit. His speeches were full of jokes and laughter, often misunderstood and misinterpreted by the foreign, particularly the American, media. He picked people out from the crowd, asking about their families or home towns, recalling a titbit of history about the place. He could switch from homespun banter to soaring rhetoric in an instant. He was learned and well read. US journalists were baffled when Chavez began to refer to George W Bush as "Mr Danger", but his Venezuelan audience picked up the literary allusion to the country's most famous novel, Dona Barbara – Mr Danger being an archetypal imperialist. But, most of all, Chavez was a teacher. I remember him exhorting his illiterate followers to learn to read. "Reading will liberate you," he told them and urged them to take part in his government's literacy drive in the shanty towns. Thousands did learn to read, many going on to become tutors themselves.

Chavez used the language of the street. The elite found him vulgar and shuddered that a lower-middle-class mixed-race soldier held the highest office in the land. But he spoke for tens of thousands of poor Venezuelans who had been overlooked for decades. Some said Chavez's language was inflammatory, but he put the country's poor on to the centre stage and told them: "You are the real Venezuela."

The coalition that supported Chavez included militant trade unionists and left-wing activists, but overwhelmingly it comprised thousands of poor Venezuelans who had never taken part in politics before. Precisely because Chavez was such a charismatic figure, the most startling fact about his Venezuela is usually overlooked – the upsurge of revolutionary grass-roots activism all over the country: hundreds of radio stations set up, popular councils, peasants' co-operatives, literacy circles, committees to bring water to shanty towns, a buzz of activity in place of despondency.

Chavez, of course, had faults. Despite being in office for years, he continued to rage like an opposition revolutionary against the powers that be. The privately owned TV stations in Venezuela were extraordinarily biased, exhorting people to protest against the elected president, misreporting a coup against Chavez and broadcasting cartoons when the coup began to unravel. So Chavez's broadsides against media magnates touched a nerve with many of his supporters, but when he began to berate individual journalists, it looked like bullying.

It was also understandable that Chavez was wary of the US. As a devourer of history books, he knew that the US had undermined and destabilised many left-wing Latin American governments; and, sure enough, the Bush administration embraced the coup against Chavez. But Chavez's desire to build a Third World coalition against the US "empire" led him to embrace many unsavoury leaders, from Gaddafi to Bashar al-Assad – an association that tarnished Venezuela which, in fact, held fair elections and respected human rights.

Perhaps the greatest error was that of his closest supporters who failed to criticise Chavez openly. Their behaviour did not reflect the vigorous debate taking place. Chavez's early death may help the Venezuelan revolution avoid the fate of Cuba – stultifying ossification – because an open debate about the future of the movement will be possible.

In his last few weeks, as Chavez lost his battle against cancer, he could be content that thousands of Venezuelans had learnt to stand up for their rights and that Latin America is now far more united than at any time in its history. He did not face the lonely and disillusioned end of his hero Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century Venezuelan independence leader, who died lamenting: "America is ungovernable. He who has served the revolution has ploughed the sea."

For all his flaws, Chavez will be remembered as one of the towering figures of Latin America history, alongside Salvador Allende, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and, of course, his revered Simon Bolivar.

Saeed Ajmal and the art of the pause

Why Pakistan's lead bowler is like an Argentinian football midfielder

SB Tang in Cricinfo

March 10, 2013

	Ajmal: master of the hook © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Saeed Ajmal Matches: South Africa v Pakistan at Cape Town Teams: Pakistan

In Argentina, they often speak of the importance of"the pause" both to their music and their football. On the football pitch, "the pause" is the moment when the designated playmaker, positioned between the lines of midfield and attack, places his foot on the ball, looks up, and pauses - in that moment, everything stops in the eye of the playmaker's mind. Out in the physical world, the expectant crowd holds their breath, waiting for the playmaker to pick out a pass.

In that instant, all futures are possible. The playmaker - one man in a team of 11 - chooses the pass to play, the path to take. He and he alone authors the team's collective fate. Like a Jedi Knight, a good playmaker must be capable of seeing things before they happen - the angled run the centre-forward is about to make behind his marking defender, the surge down the touchline that the full-back wants to make to create the overload, and perhaps even which of his own advancing attackers the opposition's spare defender intends to cover.

Thus, one man carries the weight of his team's destiny on his shoulders. That is why, in Argentinian football, the designated playmaker, the wearer of the No. 10 shirt, occupies such a special cultural place - he performs a duty that is almost sacred in its importance.

Watching Saeed Ajmal run through the world's best batting line-up in the second Test at Newlands last month, my mind turned to a different kind of pause - that in Ajmal's bowling action. Like most spinners, he approaches the crease at a smooth, comfortable canter, but unlike most spinners, just before he releases the ball, he pauses for a fraction of a second - like a claymation character in a Wallace & Gromit film - instead of driving his non-pivoting leg through the crease in one fluid motion, as the coaching manuals recommend.

However, there is a purpose behind this pause, a method to the seeming madness: the pause strips the batsman of one of his primary tools of attack and defence - his feet. Ordinarily a batsman using his feet to come down the pitch to a spinner will start his move just before or after the spinner releases the ball. By pausing just before the point of release, Ajmal makes it more likely that he will be able to see the batsman start to move before he releases the ball (thereby enabling him to change his delivery accordingly) and, more importantly, makes the batsman believe that Ajmal will be able to see him coming and adjust his delivery accordingly. This in turn causes the batsman to decide not to advance down the wicket at all, thereby removing a crucial weapon from his armoury.

In many ways phenomena like the pause are as characteristic of Pakistan's cricket culture as of Argentina's football culture. If Ajmal had suffered the misfortune of being English, there can be little doubt that the distinctive pause in his bowling action, not to mention his doosra, would have been coached out of him. As Maurice Holmes, the English mystery spinner unjustly hounded out of the English professional game at the age of 22, explained: "There will always be the English view, that something different is not necessarily something good. There are people who tend to take the traditional view that things can and should only be done in one way."

By contrast, in Australia and on the subcontinent, the finest cricketers are largely self-taught and allowed, if not encouraged, by their coaches to do what comes naturally to them, to trust their homespun techniques, to express their unique and abundant god-given talents. As Muttiah Muralitharan explained to the Cricketerrecently: "In Sri Lanka we find so many unique bowlers because we bowl naturally and are not over-coached." In Australia, Shane Warne had in Terry Jenner a coach and mentor who gave him the freedom to bowl naturally, even when that involved a substantial deviation from technical orthodoxy.

	Ajmal simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer

At this moment Ajmal is 35 years of age and at the very peak of his powers. At Newlands he produced match figures of 10 for 147. The number and identity of the wickets were impressive in themselves, the exquisite manner of their extraction even more so. During South Africa's successful final-innings chase, Jacques Kallis, arguably the finest allrounder in history, and Faf du Plessis, among the form batsmen in world cricket, were left pinioned to their crease, like the hapless, scripted victims of a WWE cage match, after being trapped plumb in front by flat, fast offbreaks. Indeed, such was the thrall in which Ajmal held the South African batsmen, we were treated to the sight of AB de Villiers doing a decent Mesut Özil impersonation, his eyes nearly popping out of his skull as he tried to decipher one of Ajmal's deliveries from the non-striker's end.

The comparison of the pause in Ajmal's bowling with the pause in Argentinian football is apposite in several respects, not least of which is the nomenclature: in Argentina, the designated playmaker is known as theenganche - literally, "the hook". How apt. For Ajmal, like all masters of the art of spin bowling, doesn't just reel in his hooked catch - no, he personally baits the hook, dangles it before his intended catch, induces the bite and then gleefully reels in his victim.

There is no better example of this than his dismissal of Hashim Amla in the second innings at Newlands. Amla was well set and cruising serenely on 54 not out, having helped steer South Africa to 146 for 3, within touching distance of their victory target of 182. Ajmal tossed one up, wide of off, nice and high above Amla's eyeline, giving him the false comfort of off-driving him for four - and the crowd the opportunity to derive aesthetic pleasure from the shot. Ajmal's next ball was just a tad higher and a fraction slower. Not even a batsman of Amla's class could resist such a delectable temptation. He unfurled his gorgeous, trademark, flourishing cover drive… and connected with nothing but air. The ball, a conventional offbreak dropping steeply, sailed through Amla's wide open gate and clipped the bails over middle and off. Amla, as good a batsman as there is right now, was left floundering and grasping for something just out of his reach, like a child straining on tiptoe to reach a jar of lollies stored on the high shelf in the kitchen.

Much like the enganche, in the moment of the pause, Ajmal carries the enormous weight of his team's fate, if not on his shoulders then certainly in his long, supple sculptor's fingers. Ajmal is not quite the sole wicket-taker in the way that the enganche is the sole creator, but there is no doubt that in the current Pakistan Test XI he is far and away the primary wicket-taker. Ajmal took took ten of the 16 South African wickets that fell in the Cape Town Test match. When Pakistan beat the world's then No. 1 Test team in the UAE in 2012, he took 24 of the 60 English wickets that fell. At Newlands, the only bowling support that Pakistan could muster for Ajmal came in the form of a 34-year-old "fast-medium" opening bowler who bowls slower than Australia's current wicketkeeper; a raw, no-ball prone, seven-foot-one-inch giant making his Test debut, and a solid one-day bowler whose Test bowling average, after nearly 50 Tests, remains stuck in the mid-30s.

Thus the comparison of Ajmal with the enganche is inapposite in one crucial respect. The enganche in the classic Argentinian 4-3-1-2 formation is neither a leader nor a hard labourer; rather, as Hugo Asch put it, he "is an artist", "a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth" who "only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". Indeed, that is the very purpose of the 4-3-1-2 formation - to protect the enganche. The bank of three behind him performs the hard physical labour of tackling, running, chasing and harrying for him, so that he is free to create art. Leadership is provided not by the enganche, but by hard-running, hard-tackling holding midfielders, such as Javier Mascherano in Argentina's 2010 World Cup team, or robust defenders, such as Roberto Perfumo in Argentina's 1966 World Cup team.

Ajmal, by contrast, is the very definition of a leader and a hard labourer. There are no other world-class bowlers in the current Pakistan Test XI to carry his water for him. He simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer.

When he claimed his sixth South African first-innings wicket at Newlands Test with a classic offspinner's delivery - a slower, flighted offbreak pitching well outside the left-hander Dean Elgar's off stump, which invited the drive and duly drew the edge to slip - Ramiz Raja said on commentary: "He's a champion, Saeed Ajmal."

That he is.

Sebastian Faulks to introduce PG Wodehouse to a new generation

 

There never was a more self-deprecating natural-born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse Photo: Getty Images

By Matthew Norman

8:06PM GMT 08 Mar 2013

5 Comments

Were there such a medal as the Literary Victoria Cross, awarded to writers who show valour far beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy, Sebastian Faulks would be nipping to Moss Bros this morning for the tails and topper preparatory to an appointment at the Palace.

Faulks has taken the single most courageous decision the world of letters has ever known, and the enemy is on the march. Dissident writers in the Soviet Union who risked their freedom and lives clearly deserve the admiration of history. Compared with the brutality that awaits the author of Birdsong for agreeing to write a Jeeves and Wooster novel at the behest of the PG Wodehouse estate, however, 17 years on the cabbage and maggot soup diet in Siberia’s least well-appointed salt mine shrinks into the equivalent of a minor train delay on a branch line near Truro.

One literary critic has already described Faulks as hubristic, and an avalanche of outrage awaits as countless Wodehouse addicts metaphorically flash him one of those Aunt Agatha glares that can open an oyster at a dozen paces. If not today, the space above this column may before long host one or two angry thoughts on the matter, and any of you whose missives appear on this page should take satisfaction from that. “Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers,” as Plum himself once observed. “Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.

Others will be less constrained by courtesy over what, given the godly status accorded him by right-thinking people, will strike them as outright sacrilege. There might be less resistance if Faulks, thinking better of the project, decided instead to pastiche the King James Bible in the style of Irvine Welsh. 

One understands the distress. It was one thing for Faulks to write a James Bond novel. No one ever described Ian Fleming, for all his story-telling gifts, as the most influential novelist in the language, as Auberon Waugh and others said of Wodehouse. Faulks himself refers to him as “inimitable”, though that barely hints at the peerlessness of Wodehouse’s limitless capacity for intricate plotting, vibrant characterisation and, above all, producing vast quantities of the most elegant, exquisite and consistently hilarious English prose.

One understands why many will be less than gruntled at the news. On reading it, to thieve from the master again, I examined my mind. It boggled. But on reflection I think that this is a good thing.

Back in the Seventies, when my early adolescent self fell insanely in love with Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Blandings Castle and especially Jeeves and Wooster, his Edwardian phraseology, sensibilities and the distant world he romanticises were faintly familiar from contact with elderly relatives, and even from Brian Johnston wittering wonderfully away on Test Match Special like a superannuated Wooster.

Today, Wodehouse is literally a closed book to the young. Book sales are heart-rendingly minute, presumably because his magically self-contained universe is 

off-puttingly remote to those who cannot imagine this country in the hands of a bunch of public schoolboys whose idea of ultimate merriment is throwing bread rolls at one another in a private dining club.

Once anyone of taste so much as dips into a novel, they will instantly be hooked. The difficult bit is getting them to open a book in the first place, and if as popular and well regarded a contemporary writer as Faulks can break that ice for those to whom Wodehouse’s escapist innocence seems irrelevant in the comedic era of Frankie Boyle, perhaps the flame will be reignited.

Reinterpreting wildly adored fictional characters is a colossal challenge, but it can be done. Admittedly on telly rather than in print, Steven Moffat has managed it astoundingly well with Sherlock Holmes, transplanting him into the Baker Street of today while cleaving absolutely to the spirit of Conan Doyle and the core of the character. Whether Faulks can come close to replicating that miraculous reinvention we will learn in the autumn, but he should be congratulated for having the guts to have a crack.

The influence of Wodehouse on our popular culture cannot be exaggerated. At the more recognisable end of the Wodehousian spectrum, you hear echoes in the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. “Without Wodehouse, I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be,” wrote the definitive television Jeeves. But he is equally audible in the Deptford brogue of the glorious Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live football shows. “It changed my life finding Wodehouse,” as Baker put it, “and gave me the language and a licence to be ludicrous. Someone who was the smartest man around and chose to write the dumbest books around – that was the key that unlocked the door.”

“Dumbest” is hardly a superlative to please every Wodehouse fan, yet the point is sound. Everybody deserves access to arguably the greatest, and surely the most joyous, English prose stylist of all time. If Sebastian Faulks is the locksmith who opens that door to a new generation, regardless of his own efforts, he will have earned more than that Literary VC.