1 In 2008, the Williams sisters declared their enthusiasm for Barack Obama but surprisingly declined to vote for him. As Jehovah’s Witnesses, they insisted, they were barred from voting in any election. Serena explained: “I’m a Jehovah’s Witness, so I don’t get involved in politics. We stay neutral. We don’t vote. So I’m not going to necessarily go out and vote for him. I would if it wasn’t for my religion.” Jehovah’s Witnesses have consistently cited John 17:16, in which Jesus says of his followers: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” as a call to refrain from such lowly matters as the governance of world superpowers.

2 If the British player Buster Mottram had had his way, Wimbledon would have been all-white in more than just dress code. A member of the National Front from 1975 onwards, he once remarked:“I hope Enoch Powell will never die, just as his namesake in the Bible never died.” Mottram subsequently attempted to redeem himself by performing with the black singer Kenny Lynch. But he was shamed again when he was expelled from the UK Independence Party (which David Cameron once described as a “bunch of . . . fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists”) for attempting to form an electoral alliance with the British National Party.

3 The German player Gottfried von Cramm had much to be nervous about ahead of his 1937 Davis Cup match against the American Don Budge, so it hardly seemed worth taking a phone call from Berlin minutes before he strolled out on to the Centre Court at Wimbledon. But as he swatted the phone away, von Cramm feared the unknown identity of the caller would distract him yet further. He turned back, to find Adolf Hitler on the line. Von Cramm was a noted anti-fascist, but after Hitler revealed his fantasies of a victory parade, he was forced to reply through gritted teeth: “Ja, mein Führer.” A pallid, trembling von Cramm emerged on court and lost the match by six sets to eight.

4 Alan Johnson soon came to regret applying tennis analogies to Gordon Brown halfway through last year’s Wimbledon. Speaking shortly after Brown’s first anniversary as Prime Minister, the then health secretary declared that Brown was not “interested in playing on the Centre Court of politics”. Johnson insisted that he’d meant the Prime Minister was “just interested in getting on with the job” – but couldn’t resist adding that Brown would “achieve the results and serve more aces than Andy Murray, whether it’s on the outer courts or whether it’s on the Centre Court”. Given Brown’s recent woes, one doubts that Murray has lost much sleep over the challenge posed by his fellow Scot.

5 Fred Perry, the last British player to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, is also the only one to have had a Labour MP for a father. A cotton spinner radicalised by the co-operative movement, Samuel Perry was elected the Co-operative Party’s first national secretary. In 1923 he became the Labour MP for Kettering. Perry fils was himself anti-establishment; Greg Rosen’s book Serving the People: a Co-operative Party History from Fred Perry to Gordon Brown unravels the red thread that links the two men.

6 Burdened by debts of £17.8m last year, Labour was forced to investigate novel means of fundraising, including auctioning off a game of tennis with Tony Blair. The offer helped the cash-strapped party secure at least £10,000 in new funding. Lord Levy, Blair’s usual tennis partner, expressed polite bemusement at the auction, declaring that “desperate times require desperate measures”.

7 Last year, the nine times Wimbledon women’s champion Martina Navratilova announced that she had regained Czech nationality more than 30 years after she fled a communist regime she compared favourably to that of her adopted country, the United States, under President George W Bush. Navratilova was born in Prague; she fled in 1975 after being denied the right to compete in professional tennis in the US, the scene of most serious tennis tournaments. She subsequently became a US citizen. The star, who supports charities devoted to children, animals and gay rights, told the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny: “The thing is that we elected Bush. That is worse. Against that, nobody chose a communist government in Czechoslovakia.”

8 In February, the United Arab Emirates caused controversy when it denied the female Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer a visa for the Dubai Tennis Championships. The world number 48 had been drawn to play the 15th seed, Anna Chakvetadze of Russia, in the first round of the event, which includes the world’s top ten women players. A month before the ban, Peer was the focal point of protests in New Zealand after Israel’s offensive in Gaza. The tournament organisers claimed that they feared public fury over Gaza would threaten Peer’s safety.

9 Tony Blair may have left office with the pay gap between men and women standing at 17.1 per cent, but when it came to Wimbledon he was a consummate redistributionist. Until 2007, the men’s champion was awarded £30,000 more in prize money than the women’s. The All England Club attempted to justify this disparity with reference to men’s best-of-five-set matches compared to women’s best-of-three, but the club finally caved in after Blair “fully endorsed” players’ demands for equal pay.

10 Is he a British champion? Or a Scottish loser? The question of Andy Murray’s national identity may be the source of innumerable jokes, but it is perhaps also a microcosm of the fraught relations between the two members of the Union. As the young star prepares to compete for Wimbledon glory, the bookmakers Paddy Power are holding a survey on whether the public – and especially the English – think Murray is British or Scottish. Speaking for Paddy Power, Darren Haines said: “Middle England has taken a while to warm to Andy but if he serves up a Wimbledon win, they’ll consider him as British as the Union Jack. An early exit, and they’ll consider him Scottish again. And who’s to say Scottish fans won’t vote to keep him for their own?” Here’s one sportsman carrying the weight of a 202-year-old political union on his 22-year-old shoulders.