Robbed of my excuse for being terrible at tennis

I suspect you really have to be Scottish yourself to realise just how unlikely it is that the trophies of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club should fall into Caledonian hands. Scots just don’t do tennis. In the same way as we’ve never really taken to cricket, punting, straw boaters and Pimm’s. Ours is a country traditionally happier with golf, boxing, cagoules and Irn Bru.

It’s not that Scots don’t have sporting talent. The nation that gave football the most amazing goal in history (Archie Gemmill’s against Holland in 1978) and which has produced athletes from Allan Wells to Colin Montgomerie, Liz McColgan to Chris Cusiter, has much to be proud of. But Scottish sporting heroes have always tended to flourish in fields where a certain roughhewn hardiness is required. Running fast in the rain and hitting things on the ground are the areas in which we have excelled since Bannockburn (a great home win we still remember in song at every rugby international).

What Scots have never done before is excel at any activity that is traditionally accompanied by eating strawberries with cream. Even that choice of fruit runs counter to our native grain. North of the border the raspberry is the soft fruit of choice. And opting for tennis, with all its strawberry and Pimm’s connotations, was, when I was growing up, the quickest way of being thought a real soft fruit by your contemporaries.

There’s certainly nothing soft about the Murray brothers. The focus and determination which both have brought to their career is a welcome corrective to the gentlemanly amateurism which sometimes seems to have characterised British tennis in the past. Maybe the Murray brothers’ success heralds a new age of Scottish-inspired professionalism that will raise our national game and make Wimbledon once more a British-dominated championship. But it is still, nevertheless, bad news where it matters most. For me personally.

Because I am now robbed of the excuse that has protected me for the past 20 or so summers that I have spent as an exile in England.

I have now lost count of the number of times well-meaning friends have coaxed and cajoled me on to the tennis court, claiming that they don’t care what standard I am, protesting that I couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that and arguing that all that mattered was that we had some gentle toing and froing to work up an appetite for the poached salmon. Every time I have been invited to pick up a racket I have protested that I can’t play tennis. At all. And I’ve always been silenced by friends who argue that anyone can play tennis and all that’s required is the normal complement of limbs and eyes to give it a go.

But then, when they’ve seen me on the court, the realisation has slowly dawned on my friends that I was certainly not indulging in false modesty or a delicate, gamesmanship-inspired, lowering of expectations the better to lull them into casualness and whup their asses. I really, really, can’t play tennis. At all.

It’s not just that I can’t hit the ball when it’s coming towards me in a way that gets it back over the net and bouncing on the other side. If only. That’s an achievement as distant from my grasp as selection for Chelsea’s starting squad next season or inclusion in a Gordon Brown ministry of all the talents. It’ll never happen. Even my subconscious mind would reject such a dream as so cosmically unlikely as to make it not worth entertaining even for a second. So bad am I at tennis that I find it almost impossible even to serve. Not just serve at speed, with a degree of accuracy, but actually throw the ball in the air and then hit it. At all.

I was once tempted on to the tennis court to play a game of mixed doubles, with my wife, against my father-in-law and another friend. My father-in-law had sunk two bottles of red at lunch and then finished with a brandy. I’d had Diet Coke. About 15 minutes later the game was over. Not because we’d had to call him an ambulance but because he had beaten me hollow. Without breaking sweat. The most energetic thing he had to do in that mauvais quart d’heure was light his cigar.

The only way in which I was able to evade my shame, and keep my wife’s respect, was to point out that, as a Scot, I came from a culture alien to tennis and point out, quite rightly, that there’d never been a single countryman of mine who’d ever got anywhere with the sport. It was a cheap excuse. But it worked. Until now.

And that’s why, delighted as I was with Jamie Murray’s victory, to paraphrase Gore Vidal, every time a Scot triumphs at tennis, a little bit of me dies . . .

Shield of anonymity blunts blog’s point

I’ve become, over time, an obsessive blog reader. From Iain Dale to Andrew Sullivan, Conservative Home to Alpha Mummy, Comment Central to The Spectator’s Coffee House, any spare time I have in front of the screen is spent admiring the perceptiveness of a gallery of brilliant commentators.

But there is one aspect of the blogosphere with which I am not yet perfectly attuned. The habit that many readers have of commenting on what they’ve just read entirely anonymously. Sometimes you find, after an admittedly controversial post, that a string of commenters have offered their own distinctive, often bilious, take on the argument behind the shield of anonymity. Some of these comments get to the heart of the weakness in the original post. But others can be just random abuse, attacks that seem to carry proportionally less weight for being made anonymously. If a poster wants to attack an individual without having the courage to identify themselves, we are unable to pass appropriate judgment on their own credentials as a critic. Doesn’t that weaken, if not negate, the substance of the critique? In any case, isn’t hurling abuse at someone from behind that anonymous shield a form of moral cowardice itself? How would any of us react to a letter that made a series of trenchant points, but to which the sender had shrunk from adding his signature? I’ll look forward to the responses to this one . . .

Campbell’s mistake

I’m looking forward to the Campbell diaries. They should provide us with a fascinating insight into politics, running and one man’s recovery from trauma to occupy a position at the heart of national life.

But I’ll probably have to wait a little while before Ming puts pen to paper.

As for his kinsman, Alastair, hasn’t he realised that providing a sanitised, partial and censored account of the Labour Government is what got him and Tony into so much trouble in the first place?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath