The minister returns to a sticky wicket

Fran Abrams talks to Chris Smith

Apparently, Chris Smith is seriously dischuffed. How one is supposed to discern this on meeting him is not immediately clear, as he is charm personified. Barely a crabby word crosses his lips during our interview in his vast office overlooking Trafalgar Square, but still the fact of his crossness hangs in the air like a warning.

Something has gone awry on the news management front and The Independent, in particular, has given cause for displeasure. The cause of this frisson is the coverage over the past few days of Mr Smith's plans for an academy of sporting excellence. More particularly, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is stung by the suggestion in our leader column on Wednesday that he has displayed symptoms of on-the-hoof policy formulation, of adopting off-the-cuff solutions that threaten to become problems of their own.

The sequence of events is as follows. Late last week the Independent on Sunday, along with other papers, is briefed on the principles which will govern the new academy. It runs a story on its front page saying that team games such as rugby, cricket and football will lose out, as individual and non-commercial sports are to be put at the centre of the project. That morning Mr Smith is interviewed on Radio 4, and says that athletes in the Olympic sports are among those most in need of support.

Lord MacLaurin, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, is interviewed by David Frost on the same day and without having seen full details of the proposals says that if cricket is to lose out, he wants greater freedom to raise money through TV deals. Mr Smith says later that he will be prepared to discuss the matter.

In the meantime, it emerges that in fact the cricket board is already planning its own academy and is not particularly upset by being left off the list for the Government's version. It also emerges that cricket, along with other team sports, will be able to use the centre's facilities for sports science, research, medicine and nutrition.

Following this rigmarole, Mr Smith was widely accused of vacillation, and of denying cricket, football and rugby access to lottery money while spending millions on volleyball and synchronised swimming. Now he wants to "set the record straight".

"What we were trying to set out was the basic philosophy as to what the academy is there to do," he says. "It is about excellence; it is about turning amateurs into world-class competitors; it is about giving our best athletes the best chance. It isn't about excluding any sports; it is about doing what's best for each individual sport." Rugby, cricket and football will all receive their own support from the lottery, he adds.

At the heart of the academy, he says, will be the academic and medical facilities which all sports can share. Other countries already have these, while Britain lags behind. Labour said so as long ago as May 1996, when it published its policy on sport.

"Suggesting that we wanted to exclude cricket and then that we had done some sort of rapid U-turn on the subject is actually complete nonsense. We have been saying this all along," he says.

In fact, once Lord MacLaurin had been equipped with the full facts at a meeting with Mr Smith on Monday, peace and harmony broke out. The cricket board chairman had even agreed that he did not want to remove all Test matches from terrestrial television screens.

Mr Smith is also clearly a little miffed by the intervention of the cricket-loving former prime minister, John Major, who had planned an academy of his own and who stepped in this week to criticise Labour's version. The Tories' own document listed a number of sports to be included but itself missed out rugby league, Mr Smith says. It was "a bit rich" for Mr Major to complain, when his government had put little flesh on the bones and had left him to work out the details.

There have also been complaints - though not in this newspaper - that the whole idea is elitist anyway. Not so, says Mr Smith. Although he does believe that Britain must improve its sporting performance abroad, the pounds 100m which will be spent on the academy is just a fraction of more than pounds 1.7bn which will go from the lottery to sport. The rest will be spent on youth and community facilities. "The whole thrust of our policy generally has been about sport for all, and particularly sport for young people."

Where, by the way, has the Minister for Sport, Tony Banks, been while all this has been going on? Is he not the sporting one around these parts? After all, the only athletic activity listed by Mr Smith in Who's Who is mountaineering. I am assured that Tony is on holiday, and that he would certainly have been handling his share of the publicity with his usual aplomb had he been present.

Mr Smith, for the record, supports Arsenal: "I am a keen football fan and a rather poor football player. I kick a ball around a little bit, but I am not up to prime ministerial standard," he says, referring to Mr Blair's apparent penchant for getting his boots out at the first hint of an opportunity.

So, M'lud, are the media guilty as charged? Certainly, there does seem to have been some cack-handedness on the Government's part. For a start, the emphasis has changed since Labour announced its policy last year, despite protestations from Mr Smith that it has not. Then the central academy was to be mainly for medicine and so on, while the training centres were to be scattered around the country. Now many of those facilities are to be at the centre, after all.

And there still is uncertainty about whether the position the Secretary of State took at the weekend is the final one. During our conversation it emerged that he had asked the four Sports Councils for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for advice on the exact form the academy should take - how many of its facilities should be at the centre and how many in the regions, and which sports it should concentrate on. A final decision would be taken around the end of September, he said, after these deliberations and further conversations with other sporting bodies were complete.

A question still hangs, too, over precisely what the minister was trying to do when he briefed the media over the weekend. He says he wanted to set out the principles behind the new academy, but why now? He could, for example, have waited until the process was complete, by which time the Minister for Sport would have been back from his holidays.

It is, of course, possible that Mr Smith felt the need for some good publicity in the wake of suggestions that his first 100 days had not been an unmitigated success. If so, things could not have gone more horribly wrong. He now says he had all the facts up his sleeve at the weekend, and that he gave some of them to the press but they were not reported. He knew the cricket board wanted its own academy; that there would be more lottery cash for team sports; that the centre's facilities would be largely open to all. Somehow the message did not come across. So, shoot the messenger?