What if Wimbledon had managed the UK’s pandemic response, asked John Lanchester in a jaunty 2021 essay. Wimbledon, where I have had the good fortune to have spent a few days, is the UK’s greatest sporting instrument of soft power, which for a fortnight each year pushes tennis to the very centre of national consciousness, with the BBC its broadcasting partner-in-chief, as if it is still 1976… Is there still honey for tea?
The appeal of Wimbledon is to present to the world an idealised summer vision of England – manicured lawns, white flannels, strawberries and cream, aisle attendants with quasi-military uniforms designed by Ralph Lauren – as imagined by Rupert Brooke, or reimagined for a modern audience by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. The trick is to offer a sense of continuity through time, a changing changelessness, the tournament taking place in some kind of walled garden, in and of the capital city, and yet distinctly apart from it.
But behind the artifice and the charm is a ruthless corporate machine, the All England Club, which manages the tournament with a profitable efficiency that seems increasingly anomalous in a country in which the most common complaint is: “Nothing works.”
Wimbledon works all right on multiple levels: sporting, social, commercial, recreational. Here’s one example. In 2003, in the aftermath of the Sars epidemic, Wimbledon purchased pandemic insurance at the cost of £1.5m a year. It turned out to be one of the most famous investments in insurance history because when Covid struck in 2020, the All England Club cancelled the tournament for the first time since the Second World War and “trousered cheques totalling £174m”. That is, Lanchester wrote, “what competent governance looks like. What would the UK response have looked like if the All England Club had been in charge? What would the Wimbledon number – the death toll assuming competent government – have been?”
One could extend the questions. What would have happened to the Labour government in its first year if Wimbledon controlled the Treasury rather than a bunch of mandarins committed to failed orthodoxies? Would the debacle over the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance have been avoided? The £24bn tax hike on employment? The humiliating U-turn over the welfare reform bill, to which Keir Starmer said he only turned his attention days before the Commons vote?
Alternatively, imagine if the Starmer government oversaw Wimbledon. What kind of tournament would it be? Would competent governance and long-term decision-making be replaced by desperate demands to smash the gangs of ticket touts and abrupt shifts in strategy days before the first match on Centre Court?
Back to this year’s championship. One striking difference was the disappearance of on-court line judges, replaced by automation. This is a portent of what is to come more widely in our lives when, some decades hence, even this column is likely to be written by AI, in the style of my old friend, and this magazine’s longest-serving columnist, Hunter Davies.
The last time I occupied this slot was around this time last year when, on the day of the general election, I was at Wimbledon to watch Jack Draper, the rising star of men’s tennis, take on Cameron Norrie. Norrie won in straight sets, and this year he was, improbably, the only British player to make it to the second week. He has none of the charisma or sublime natural talent of Draper, or indeed Emma Raducanu, but he’s extraordinarily resilient, a grinder. Born in Johannesburg, the son of a Scottish father and Welsh mother, he spent much of his childhood in New Zealand, before moving to England in search of funding from the Lawn Tennis Association. Like many modern tennis pros on tour, he is kind of a citizen of nowhere; his curious hybrid accent locates him somewhere in the mid-Atlantic (although he now lives in Monaco). Wimbledon, he says, is the greatest tournament in the world. He’s right about that, for reasons Starmer and co would do well to understand.
[See also: Britain has always loved nepo babies]
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This article appears in the 09 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Harbinger