Tim Wigmore

The cancellation of Wimbledon this summer deprived fans of their annual exercise in moralising. There is one topic SW19-goers love to complain about every year: the grunting sounds that players emit as they hit the tennis ball. Maria Sharapova, who retired in February, was called the Queen of Screams. Her grunts were once recorded at 101 decibels, more than a Boeing 707 as it touches down. They even inspired a series of ringtones. ‘I’ve done this ever since I started playing tennis and I’m not going to change,’ Sharapova once said. Yet her grunts were said to be mysteriously absent on the practice court. Grunting can give players a tactical advantage.

In 1930, Jules Rimet, the creator of the Football World Cup, crossed the Atlantic in a steamship to attend the inaugural competition in Uruguay. In his bag he carried a small trophy, the World Cup; in his heart he carried the belief that the World Cup could unite nations and smooth nationalism. ‘Men will be able to meet in confidence without hatred in their hearts and without an insult on their lips,’ he declared. Rimet would have been horrified by what the World Cup has become. A tournament that has funded the endemic corruption and racketeering within Fifa exposed by the FBI.

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003. The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20.

For a centre-right political party, the Conservatives are oddly obsessed with where people went to school. Michael Gove and Lady Warsi both lamented the number of Old Etonians in influential positions earlier this year. It may not have been coincidence that, within five months, both had moved posts: there remains a potent undercurrent of class tension in today’s Conservative party. The charge sheet is simple. David Cameron has stacked the corridors of power with those who share his black-and-turquoise old school tie. How can it be that British politics has regressed into the chumocracy days of Harold Macmillan? Yet the prominence of Old Etonians today is not a throwback to an era that we thought we’d left behind — it’s a last hurrah.

The school trip now seems rather quaint. When you can see the whole world on Google Maps, what’s the point of traipsing to the seaside to see longshore drift in action? In an age of austerity, moreover, the school trip might seem an unaffordable indulgence. Yet parents seem to think otherwise: according to a recent Family Finances Report, 69 per cent of parents are willing to pay for school field trips in Britain. Experiencing the real world — rather than merely reading or writing about it, or staring at it through a computer — should be an essential part of education. The government agrees. Last October, Michael Gove unveiled a £5 million scheme designed to fund trips to the first world war battlefields for thousands of pupils in England.

John McCain cut rather a sad sight last night as he addressed the Republican National Convention on his 76th birthday. Four years ago, he would have envisaged spending the convention stepping up his campaign for a second presidential term. Now, he was reduced to a speech that attracted only polite interest from delegates, who were far more enthused by the offerings from Rand Paul and Paul Ryan. Few people are consigned to history more rapidly than nominees who lost a presidential election: none since Nixon, with his almost unique powers of resilience, have later campaigned seriously to reclaim the nomination. At times it felt as though the only applause McCain was receiving was from his home state of Arizona, and even that sprang less from enthusiasm, and more from dutifulness.