The words thin edge of the wedge hovered overhead

The words “thin edge of the wedge” hovered overhead.Why should the purchase of a five-day cricket match bother us so much? For fear that it won’t stop here: anyone who has heard MacKenzie in mid- rant about the BBC knows he won’t be happy until he’s bought up the rights to every Test next century, and the headquarters of the Test and County Cricket Board as well. It will mean the end of Test Match Special.As much an English institution as Gentleman’s Relish, Burlington Arcade and Desert Island Discs, Test Match Special defies logic. From 10.45am until stumps at any time after 7pm, it fills the day with hyper-precise yet baffling descriptions (“Atherton takes a flash as it passes just wide of the off-stump”) of the slowest game in the world. Over its 42-year history, a panel of commentators with reductive nicknames – Henry “Blowers” Blofeld, Trevor “The Boil” Bailey, Jonathan “Aggers” Agnew, Christopher “CMJ” Martin-Jenkins and the late, now sainted, John Arlott and Brian Johnston – filled in the many longueurs with Flannel Radio: chat about batting statistics, banter over listeners’ letters and gifts of homemade cakes, interviews with cricketing greats and practical jokes.Once, a fellow commentator altered the biographical details of James Judd – conductor of the Halle Orchestra – so that Johnston found himself asking the great man about his pet ferrets, his sponsorship by Weetabix, and how he came to compose the theme music to Every Which Way But Loose.And now (a nation shudders) Test match coverage could be in the hands of MacKenzie. If the former editor of The Sun could fill a no-budget, no-audience TV station with tasteless and barmy wheezes – topless darts, the News Bunny, the weather read in Norwegian by a Nordic bombshell, Samantha’s Big City Tips, in which questionable advice about share movements was given by a young woman who gradually shed her upper garments – what might he do with a key sporting event, a potentially huge audience and a mountain of wonga?Can we expect to hear the promised line-up of Geoff Boycott, John Emburey and Phil Tufnell making tasteless anti-Afrikaaner jokes about the host nation in November? Will a seductive female voice explain the concept of the “follow-on” while removing her clothes, unseen? In the event of a leg-before decision, will the studio resound with carnival music and cries of “Gotcha!”? And what of the likely quality of the broadcasts, given the fiasco of Talk Radio’s Lewis-Holyfield coverage, in which Chris Eubank, Frank Bruno and Jim Rosenthal virtually ditched all commentary in favour of premature celebration of Lewis’s “win”.It would be wrong to be snotty about MacKenzie’s bold move. Test Match Special is a fine institution, but it isn’t a flower of high culture. Indeed, it fits rather well with the MacKenzie world view in its obsession with sexual innuendo (“legovers”, “flashers”), its fondness for inter- staff japes, its matey closeness to its audience, its respect for English traditions, its partisanship.Talk Radio must buy a job lot of Aggers and Blowers and move them wholesale to 1089am.

That’s the logical outcome in a free market where the BBC has set the prices – and the tone – for too long.. FERGAL KEANE’S article in Saturday’s Independent was a powerful denunciation of Slobodan Milosevic’s catastrophic impact on all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. But his objection to comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler are wrong, though Fergal is obviously right to point out that, unlike Hitler who had slaughtered half the world’s Jewish population before his death, Milosevic “does not care one way or the other about the survival of the Albanian race”. Those of us who have made the comparisons between Milosevic and Hitler are not comparing the situation at the end of Hitler’s period in power, but the methods by which he rose to power and engulfed Europe in war. Like Hitler with the Jews, Milosevic has inflamed and exploited the fears of some Serbs about their Muslim and Croat neighbours in order to rise to power. As with Hitler’s demand to extend the boundaries of Germany to incorporate all Germans living in neighbouring lands, so Milosevic invaded first Slovenia and Croatia, followed by Bosnia, in order to incorporate all Serbs in a state under his control.

Now he is driving the Albanians out of Kosovo in order to find living space for Serb refugees who are the consequence of his wars of aggression.
When Milosevic first sent his armoured columns into Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 I was the first member of Parliament to call for air strikes to defeat his aggression. Air strikes alone at that point might have been enough to deter his future plans, or even lead to his overthrow in Belgrade.Unfortunately the response of Britain and America was to hope that the problem would go away. Those of us who had no doubt about Milosevic’s long-term strategy watched the Tory foreign secretary Douglas Hurd’s Chamberlainesque performances in the House of Commons with contempt. Recognising as a weakness our aversion to any decisive action, Milosevic ploughed on to unleash the worst genocide in Europe in 50 years, as his thugs butchered their way through the Muslim and Croat populations of Bosnia.Once again Britain and America were loath to intervene and it was only when television captured the image of starving Bosnians in concentration camps that the world, including Russia, decided they must stop the slaughter. The same pattern was repeated in Kosovo.Just as the world objected to Hitler’s attacks on German Jews throughout the Thirties, so once again we deplored the suppression of the Kosovan parliament but were not prepared to take action throughout the last decade as almost all the Albanian Kosovars were stripped of their rights to education and work in their own land.The Nato intervention against Milosevic is a response to growing public revulsion at the way that George Bush, Bill Clinton and John Major stood by and did nothing to help the people of Kosovo throughout this last decade, and a determination that it should not happen again. This is an eerie echo of the situation when Germany invaded Poland and it was only the greatest public pressure that prevented Chamberlain from backing down in the face of Hitler’s aggression.It is these facts that have led many of us to draw parallels between Hitler and Milosevic based on hard historical facts. But Fergal Keane makes another charge, which is that the Holocaust was “the greatest evil of our century”, “the crime of crimes”, and that Hitler was “a singular figure of evil” who “made all other war aims secondary to the extermination of the Jewish race”.It is simply not the case that the extermination of the Jews was the primary war aim of Hitler.