James Lawton: Government's feeble posturing deservedly hit for six

Shifting responsibility on to single World Cup game in Zimbabwe is a poor substitute for coherent and principled foreign policy

It is a stunning concept, admittedly, but who can deny that a chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board has got something right?

The decision to ignore the Government's shameless shifting of responsibility in the matter of action against Robert Mugabe's appalling regime and play a pool game of the World Cup in Zimbabwe next month will probably anger those jerkers of the knee who have already categorised Nasser Hussain and his team as inhabitants of a closed, sad little world whose horizons stretch no further than the next modestly rewarded cricket tour.

It is a view so simplistic the mind reels.

There are times when a professional sportsman, like the rest of us, has to stand up for what he likes to think he represents. It is also true that cricket doesn't exactly enjoy a glowing record of hard principle. The fact that the current chairman of England's selectors, David Graveney, and two former captains, Mike Gatting and Graham Gooch, took the apartheid penny is something of a fitfully sleeping reproach in the current situation.

But let's inject a little reality and point fingers where they are really deserved.

While the Government falls in line with America for the vast expense of war against Iraq, its courage somewhat falters in the matter of the loathsome Mugabe and the devastation he has caused to lives of the his people, who may naïvely have looked for a bit of moral support from the old mother country.

Finally the master plan was unveiled. No stringent clamp down on trade with Mugabe's pariah state – it might hurt the economy and lose jobs. Not even a wisp of gunboat diplomacy. No boycotting by the Prime Minister of a heads of government meeting in South Africa where Mugabe was allowed to sneer, with the rabid support of his cronies, at this country.

No, none of that. The Government's initiative, the move to send Mugabe into free fall, is not to play a single cricket match... a match that confers no credit on Mugabe, but is appealed for by some of the most hard-stretched victims of his policy who have seen their life's work, and the means of feeding the country, swept away by unchecked mobs marauding down on the farms.

We have seen for many years the way a British government sees sport as a whipping boy. Margaret Thatcher wanted identity cards for football while pointedly refusing to accept that the national game was more than anything a victim of fissures in the society that she had casually announced no longer existed.

The current Government, however, is racking up a quite appalling record. The authors of the Dome embarrassment pulled the plug on Pickett's Lock, and announced to the world in general and the ruling body of international athletics in particular that we have become a third-class sports nation. Its feeble response and unhelpful contribution to the Wembley fiasco is all the more depressing when we consider the magnificent record of the French government in its support of the superb World Cup of 1998 and the nifty way it put together the beautiful Stade de France.

Its pièce de résistance, though, has been the attempt to employ, at ruinous, uncompensated cost, embattled English cricket as the striking arm of what passes for foreign policy.

None of this should preclude an individual English cricketer making his own moral decision. Certainly it can be argued that playing in Zimbabwe implies some kind of acceptance of the Mugabe regime. But then it is hard to recall any outrage when England recently toured Pakistan, whose domestic and foreign policies do not exactly point to a new world overflowing with liberalism – and the Mugabe regime does exist utterly unhampered by any serious action by the British government.

If there is any easy contempt flying around this morning it surely should be directed towards Whitehall rather than St John's Wood. Nottinghamshire's chief executive, David Collier, a member of the board's management committee, has expressed his own reservations about giving even the most glancing succour to Mugabe. But he also says, "Clearly the one thing everybody is adamant about is that we are very disappointed in the Government's handling of the situation."

Maybe the best thing that Lord's can say is thank God they do not play cricket in Iraq.