Thank goodness a cricket-loving prime minister with a proper sense of right and wrong has at last taken a stand on Zimbabwe. Tony Blair and his Government weakly missed their chances both before the 2003 World Cup in southern Africa and again in 2004, when the England team were forced by the threat of fines to play in Zimbabwe against a team hopelessly depleted by internecine strife and political interference from the associates of a ruthless despot.

The ECB and its chairman, David Morgan, were caught then between a rock and a hard place. A fine of at least £1 million was more than the board could reasonably be asked to sacrifice by ICC officials determined to avoid a split on political grounds by refusing to take a stand for acceptable standards of human behaviour. Like the Australian Cabinet, the British Government knew exactly what the realpolitik of the situation demanded, but it sheltered behind sanctimonious statements.

With luck, the example set by John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, yesterday will be followed by Caribbean administrations and by the British Government. As things stand, Zimbabwe, having disqualified themselves from Test cricket last year to avoid humiliation on the field, are due to return to the fold against West Indies in November.

Malcolm Speed, the ICC chief executive, is often portrayed as inflexible, but he is as much a pragmatist as the next man, if only politicians of goodwill can be persuaded to assist him in keeping the leading cricketing nations together. Only by sticking to rules created by the chief executives of the full member countries has that been possible.

At first Howard said that he was prepared to pay the automatic fine that faces countries not prepared, other than for the accepted ICC reasons, to fulfil their obligation to play a minimum number of matches against other nations in the programme of future tours. Then the penny dropped. His order forbidding the tour made an ICC fine irrelevant and leaves everyone happy except the dwindling band of cricketers in Zimbabwe. They are innocent victims by and large, but may yet get a chance to play Australia on neutral territory.

In its stand, the Australian Government has avoided a waste of money – including the subsequent legal bills – and enabled the ICC to uphold its understandable, but still blinkered, regulations.

Zimbabwe’s cricket cannot be rescued if the ICC continues to feed money to dubious officials in Harare in the fond imagination that it will somehow keep the game going there. Only a change of regime will begin to allow a revival.

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