Ricky Hatton was floored in Las Vegas, but it is good to see the sport of boxing getting up off the canvas again. Yet when even the Prime Minister feels compelled to announce that he will stay up to watch the big fight, it looks like some might want to “fix” boxing for their own ends.

For years, boxing has been the sporting equivalent of the booze and junk food that Hatton enjoys between fights, its working-class aggression widely viewed as below the belt in modern Britain. The British Medical Association has demanded a ban since 1982, and boxing was all but knocked out of terrestrial television. Now, however, we have had the Ricky-fest surrounding his world welterweight fight with Floyd Mayweather, followed by Joe Calzaghe, Wales's super-middleweight world champion, winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year ahead of the lightweight Lewis Hamilton, with Hatton third.

Not all the reasons for this revival are as charming as Hatton himself. When everything from war to religion seems to divide rather than unite people, many are desperate to find a shared national experience through sport. And with the England football team knocked out even before the bell rings, boxing has been brought in as a late replacement. Thus before Saturday's fight, Hatton was praised most for bringing British people together. As Gordon Brown put it: “He will have the whole country behind him” — in which case the envious Prime Minister was not about to be the odd Briton out. He stopped short of dubbing the hitman the People's Pugilist.

Likeable and honest boxers such as Hatton, Calzaghe and Amir Khan also appeal to those who want to lumber sporting “role models” with the job of training youngsters for life. The authorities even imagine that Khan can KO extremism among Muslim youth. Some have tried to bring back boxing in state schools, supposedly to fight obesity, leading to clashes with rival health crusaders in the other corner.

This is all about trying to beat boxing out of shape to make it look like something else — a harmless source of personal fitness or of national unity and happiness. Yet despite all that has been done to make it safer, boxing remains a sport based on the vicarious enjoyment of organised violence meted out by mutual consent. That, I'm afraid, is still what makes it compelling to many of us, whether the fair weather (rather than Mayweather) fans like it or not. As Hatton said afterwards: “It's not a tickling contest.”

I suspect that is one reason why boxing may not tickle the fancy of some newfound Hatton fans for long. But for others among us, enjoying a bit of late-night ring brutality seems no big deal one way or the other. After all, there are other, rather more violent, contests in foreign arenas over which our leaders might lose more sleep.

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