1. Preserve what is good.

That is what Conservatives do, isn't it? Please bear in mind the image of a young Indian cricketer, 40 years my junior, with his arm round my shoulder. The grass is green, the houses are stone-built and thatched, the church clock has just struck three and he says, "My God, I love England." And a good part of the reason he says it is because we can live out a full sporting aspiration here (call it fantasy if you like) dressed in whites, on a spacious grass surface, with proper changing facilities, etc. And "we" here are a pensioner and an overseas student, neither of whom are elite sportsmen. This is unique to our country; elsewhere such organised sport is the prerogative of the young and the talented or the socially privileged. What we have is an astonishing range of clubs and grounds: 7,000 cricket clubs, 3,000 rugby clubs, 45,000 football clubs (the FA's figure, which I don't quite believe) of which more than 100 are fully professional.

But they are in trouble. They have depended on the voluntary principle so that they are undermined by professionalism, materialism, commuting, etc - all the kind of socio-economic change that Robert Putnam analysed in the American case in his book Bowling Alone. British sports clubs have lived their lives in a part of civil society ring-fenced from the state and the market, as oases from the real world until the last 15 years when they have been increasingly exposed to the need to pay professionals, to compete for lottery money, to implement stringent health and safety and child protection regulations, and so on. The trouble is that this whole structure of English sport, though loved by its participants, is misunderstood not only by governments but by the national associations that run it. They always talk the language of instrumentality, of sport being good for crime rates, health, education, national prestige etc. But to us it is part of the meaning of life, an end in itself, precisely the philosophical category that governments cannot acknowledge. I know from dealing with people at Lord's that it is impossible for someone who has spent his life involved in professional cricket to see 7,000 cricket clubs as anything other than a "pyramid" which exists to provide an England team at its apex. And at least equally impossible to understand how much fun it is to play the game unintentionally badly.

The question of what you do to help clubs in the way of tax privileges, waived regulations and so on is too complex for this article - though you might start with an "existing use" protection for sports facilities in the planning system. It is clearer what you should undo-the structure that draws clubs into a web of aims and objectives concerned with national success. For a Conservative, surely, the fact that I have paid more than £400 to join the tennis club should make it mine. So I should not be bundled off the court for the coaching of a foul-mouthed non-paying wannabe who is part of a Soviet-style project to produce a Wimbledon winner. But having said that, I should also point out that as a member of a tennis ladder which pits you against players of similar standard with no regard for age or gender, I often play teenagers who are at least as gentlemanly and good-humoured as anyone in my generation. This is about English club autonomy versus government interference, not about O tempora, o mores.