3. Accept Mixed Government.

The logical minds of the European Commission and the European Court of Justice have struggled somewhat with the concept of sport. From 1995 to 1997, they were determined to implement the theory that it was an "economic" activity, to be regulated in the same way as other economic activity. This is parallel to the simple-minded libertarian view that sport is "entertainment". Both are nonsense, at least in their one-dimensional forms. All sorts of people trot out the cliché that "Sport is big business now" and the European Union does classify it as the sixth biggest "industry" on the continent. But in an important sense it is obviously false. Sports clubs and associations may be run by businessmen and women, they may turn over large sums of money, but they are nothing like firms. Like universities and aristocratic estates, they have a priori missions: they cannot merge or diversify and they very rarely make profits. If they could do these things, most football clubs would become retail parks. As Sir Alan Sugar said in amazement at the expectations people had of him at Tottenham Hotspur: "I'm a one-trick pony. I make money, I don't give it away."

The official European doctrine now is that sport is a "primarily cultural" activity. This is probably a marginally better assumption than its predecessor, but modern sport can only really be understood as a contested concept. From its inception it was potential commercial entertainment to some, moral and educational crusade to others and mere pastime to some more. It is eternally laced with competing dualities: participant/spectator, commercial/cultural, club/country. Football's governing body, Fifa, running a multi-billion pound empire from the semi-secrecy of Switzerland, still employs an important concept from the lips of Dr Thomas Arnold: gentlemanly conduct.

The principle to be applied here is that of mixed government. Baron de Montesquieu noted in 18th-century England that the country was prospering despite - and possibly because of - its simultaneous and contradictory employment of all the Aristotelian principles of government. It was monarchy, republic and aristocracy all at once and had successfully abandoned the disastrous 17th- century demand for ideological consistency. Historically, conservatism has been good at seeing what works and living with contradictions and this may be a place to apply that kind of pragmatism. One example may be the issue of events "listed" for free-to-air television. Whereas a liberal-commercial perspective suggests that this is nonsense, an excessive interference with a market in private tastes, the Arnoldian educational suggestion must be that we should maximise the awareness of cultural activities which are both traditional and virtuous, at least to some degree. Cricket is at the moment suffering from its lack of popular exposure. I don't believe that it is a sufficient condition of people choosing to participate that they can see the activity on terrestrial television, but it may be a necessary one.