The width of a cigarette paper between them?

In April 1990 the old controversialist Norman Tebbit bowled the Los Angeles Times (I kid you not) a googly:

A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It’s an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?

Presumably the LA Times, educated by Sir C. Aubrey Smith’s Hollywood Cricket Club, had some appreciation of the social rules (as opposed to ‘Laws of Cricket‘) of the game:

Few A-list names, from David Niven to Errol Flynn to Ronald Colman, failed to pay a ritual call to Smith’s villa at 2881 Coldwater Canyon Drive, where the raised Union Jack denoted a sort of semi-ambassadorial status. Many more found themselves pressed into spending long hot Sunday afternoons in the field, where Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes) mingled with the likes of George Coulouris (Citizen Kane) while P.G. Wodehouse took notes from the boundary. Like every major star before him, Olivier dutifully joined the consensus that spring morning in 1933. He showed up at the ground in size 13 boots hurriedly borrowed from Boris Karloff. Smith himself remained an active member of the side throughout his 70s, and an occasional player into his 80s. Dubbed `Round the Corner’ because of a peculiar crablike run when bowling, he not only regularly took 50 wickets a season but also interested himself in literally everyone and everything behind the scenes. An annual general meeting early in the Second World War included a vote of thanks to the president, Karloff, Cary Grant and others `in connection with the large sums raised for the Commando Fund’, while at the AGM of May 1945 he spoke at length not about victory in Europe but rather the knotty problem of moles damaging the wicket.

That’s from here, by the way. Worth the trip for the rest of the piece.

In 2013 Jeremy Corbyn, not yet enstooled as patron-saint of all-things Momentum, pontificated at a London meet, sponsored by the propaganda arm of Hamas, and the Palestine Return Centre:

[British Zionists] clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.

Since history tells me that the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 began with a military coalition of Arab states to drive Jews into the sea, with various re-matches since, and Hamas was founded to establish an Islamic state across modern Israel and Palestine, I’m not sure Jeremy Corbyn’s interpretation of ‘history’ should stand unchallenged.

However, for the moment, two thoughts — the relation of the second to the rest of this post may require some ‘parallel thinking’:

• Why was Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 “ironic” less racist or culturalist or über-nationalist than Norman Tebbit’s 1990 “cricket test”?
• Today is the saint’s day of Louis IX Capet (King of France 1226 to 1270). He was one of the more competent of his dynasty — thanks to close guidance by his mother, Blanche of Castile, and later (mainly clerical) additions to his circle. That competence meant his reign was critical in the ‘nation-building’ of France, was greatly facilitated by a lack of familial discord (as affected the neighbouring kingdoms), and he managed a working arrangement with the troubled papacy. His sponsorship and participation in two Crusades (though he pegged out at Tunis in his second — the Eighth — en route) earned his prompt canonisation in 1297.