AS prime minister, he chose cricket as an image to evoke a nostalgic Britain of “long shadows on county grounds and warm beer”. Now, John Major is to write a history of the game that has been his lifelong passion.

He will become one of only a handful of former prime ministers to have written a book about subjects outside politics. He will attempt to look beyond the scorecards to depict the social impact of the game and how it has reflected Britain’s changing class structure.

In the book, which will be published next year, Major will concentrate partly on the game’s old Gentlemen versus Players divide, reflecting the class stratification that he himself overcame: climbing from humble beginnings to eventually lead the country.

Throughout his rise to prominence, Major remained devoted to what he saw as the honest, old-fashioned values of cricket — such as fairness and resilience — that reflected his brand of Conservatism.

“Too often cricket is seen simply in terms of what happens on the field and is, therefore, somewhat one-dimensional,” he said. “I hope to put the game in the context of its times.”

Major will receive a six- figure sum for the book. HarperCollins, his publisher, was delighted when his memoirs sold about 100,000 hardback copies.

Although they lacked any “killer” revelation — they did not, for example, mention his affair with Edwina Currie, which only came out when she published her autobiography — they were well received by critics and the general public, who saw in Major a man they liked.

Since his boyhood he has been a huge cricket fan, regularly watching Surrey play at the Oval, not far from his family home in south London.

He wrote with passion in his 1999 memoirs of “almost living at the Oval in school holidays where, armed with sandwiches and a soft drink, I sat in perfect contentment”. Then, in the 1950s, Surrey were one of the leading county sides and boasted players such as Alec and Eric Bedser, Jim Laker, Tony Lock and Peter May.

Major’s best-remembered quotation, made in 1993 when he was prime minister, used cricket in an attempt to persuade Eurosceptics that Brussels was not a threat to Britain. “Fifty years on from now,” he said, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist.”

During his period in office he would occasionally find time to play cricket while on foreign tours. He also used to watch matches at Lord’s with Lord Archer, his fellow Conservative and cricket lover, who had a box at the ground.

On the day Major lost the general election in 1997, he went to the Oval to watch his beloved county team. He is a life vice-president of Surrey. “My affection for it (cricket) pre-dates politics and will outlast it,” he wrote in his memoirs.

His book will begin by looking at the development of the game in England, initially in the middle of the 18th century when the landed gentry (gentlemen) often employed good cricketers (players) to play on their private teams.

Cricket in its modern form began on the village green in Hambledon, Hampshire, in about 1756. Even in those early days the sport had a mix of the rural working class and the gentry. The captain of Hambledon, Lord Winchilsea, went on to co-found the Marylebone cricket club in 1787.

The game spread in the Victorian era to public schools with their notion of “muscular Christianity”. Cricket was then taken to the empire before county matches and international Test series started towards the end of the 19th century.

The former prime minister will not just look at cricket in England but also in other countries, notably the Commonwealth, where it has flourished. In the West Indies, for example, it has always been seen as a sport of the ordinary people.

Major is a fan of the late West Indian writer C L R James, calling his Beyond a Boundary “a masterpiece, which sets out better than anyone before or since how cricket affects character and illustrates the better virtues”.

In some ways, James’s committed Marxist views confirm Major’s argument that cricket transgresses political views and class prejudices.

“John Major is in a perfect position to write this sort of book on cricket,” said David Rayvern Allen, author of a biography of the cricket writer E W Swanton. “He can approach the game from without, as it were, and yet also from within as a huge fan.”

Major has been enthused by England’s recent success in Test matches. The team won eight in a row last year and almost made it a run of nine last week against South Africa. “We’ve an excellent team now, which is still improving,” said Major. “One of the most attractive features is that every member is a potential match winner. It’s been a long time since we’ve been in such a position.”

He will not be the first former prime minister to write a book on cricket. Michael Manley, who was Jamaica’s leader in the 1980s, wrote about the game in the West Indies after retiring.

Several former British premiers, including Major, have written memoirs, but only a few have tried other types of book. Benjamin Disraeli wrote 10 novels and Sir Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Sir Edward Heath wrote books on sailing and music. Norma Major, John’s wife, has written a book about opera.

Major was not the first cricket lover to inhabit Downing Street. Clement Attlee installed a tickertape machine at No 10 so he could keep in touch with scores.

Alec Douglas-Home, who was prime minister from 1963-4, was both a keen fan and a good player in his youth. He was better than Major, who once admitted he had “ambitions to play for Surrey, but not the ability”.

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