As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz comes under fire after losing painfully to the far-right AfD in a state election, he can console himself, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, that his counterpart in Paris is “also despised”. So were the two previous French presidents. None of the last five US leaders has managed an average approval rating above 50%. Here in inclusive Britain, we have hated “white, Asian, male, female, young, old, Conservative, Labour, southern and northern” prime ministers since 2016. Before that, it was not unheard of for one to rule for a decade. Between 1975 and 2007, Australia had four heads of government. It has had seven since. There are two possibilities: either all the big rich countries mysteriously suffered a simultaneous drop in the quality of their leaders, or voters have become harder to please. “It should be clear which is more plausible.”

The West does not have a leadership problem, it has a “followership problem”. Voters reject policies – “however objectively necessary” – that cost them anything. One result is vast levels of government debt; another is the “flaying alive” of any leader who tries to fix this, or anything else. In just the past decade, policies from which heads of government have “never really recovered” include, in France, raising the retirement age to 64 and, in Britain, a cut to winter fuel subsidies, amounting to all of £1.4bn. Imagine the predicament of the modern leader, trying to please an electorate that is “three or four generations into the welfare state and global peace”. The choice is stark: remain popular or make much-needed reforms. Without a crisis to make voters more “pliable”, Western nations have become “ungovernable”.

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The year 1864 marked a watershed for cricket, says Jim Lawley in The Spectator. Football was still in its infancy, so cricket was played all year round, including in the dead of winter. The smooth surfaces of frozen lakes made for prodigious scoring – boundaries didn’t exist, so batsmen simply kept running until the fielders could return the ball. In a match on grass that year between “United England” and “All England”, William Mortlock hit the ball out of the ground and into a walled garden across the road. “The stroke brought seven runs.” Gamesmanship was rife: in Melbourne the Australians tried to prevent an England victory by repeatedly stopping for brandy. The heat is enough to “induce thirst”, said one England player, but “not such an unquenchable thirst as to require drinks every ten minutes”.

The public’s appetite for cricket news was “insatiable”. The Dundee Advertiser ran a detailed report on a match in which Academy United beat Thistle by “16 runs and an innings”. When a reader wrote in to point out that the match had been played by eight-year-old boys using an India-rubber ball, “without umpires, full teams or much regard for the laws of cricket”, the editor confessed that he had assumed the clubs were respectable because the boy who submitted the report had such good handwriting. Newspapers gleefully reported on contests pitting married men against single men, fathers against sons, “over 5ft 8in vs under 5ft 8in”, Whigs vs Tories and even “bearded vs barefaced”. In Peckham, more than 1,000 turned out to watch one-armed players take on one-legged opponents, and on Boxing Day, the Leeds Times reported a match on the frozen Moor Dam at Yeadon: “11 men wearing skates against 11 without”.

To buy 1864: The Year That Changed Cricket by Kit Harris, click here.

“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”
GK Chesterton

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