JOHN VIRGO (1946 - 2026): AN OBITUARY

John Virgo, who has left the green baize aged 79, was the snooker professional whose greatest talent lay not in potting the black but in impersonating those who could. In a sport that prides itself on monastic silence and geometric certainty, Virgo brought the music-hall tradition of the cheeky interjection, and for that alone the gods of baize should be grateful.

Born in Salford in 1946, at a time when the city’s chimneys still outranked its crucibles, Virgo discovered snooker in the kind of smoky working-men’s clubs where the air was thick enough to cushion a miscue. He turned professional comparatively late, at thirty, and promptly announced himself by winning the UK Championship in 1979, dispatching Terry Griffiths in the final with the calm assurance of a man who knew the table better than his opponents knew their own nerves. That same year he reached the World Championship semi-finals, only to be halted by Dennis Taylor. Thereafter the major titles eluded him, as they elude most, but Virgo never allowed mere statistics to cramp his style.

His true métier emerged when the cue was laid aside and the microphone taken up. On Big Break, that improbable 90's confection hosted by Jim Davidson, Virgo performed trick shots and impressions with the timing of a born comedian. His Alex Higgins was uncannily wild-eyed; his Steve Davis a study in robotic precision. Viewers who had never previously cared about snooker found themselves oddly charmed by a man who treated the green baize as a stage rather than an altar.

As a BBC commentator he became an institution, his voice a mixture of Lancashire vowels and delighted astonishment. “Where’s the cue ball going?” he would cry whenever physics took an unexpected holiday, a question that summed up both the drama of the shot and the essential absurdity of human endeavour. For thirty years he supplied the soundtrack to countless Crucible epics, never quite impartial, always unmistakably himself.

Off the table, life was less straightforward. Gambling took its toll; marriages came and went; a house was repossessed. Yet Virgo retained the performer’s instinct for recovery, emerging with an autobiography whose title, Say Goodnight, JV, carried the wistful shrug of a man who had learned to live with the rebound. In the end, snooker owed him a debt it can never fully repay: he reminded a solemn sport that laughter is not a foul but a safety. The table is quieter now. Somewhere, though, the cue ball is still going – and we know exactly who is asking where. 

WHY DO OUR HEDGEROWS NEED DECOLONISING?

One of the minor consolations of growing older is that one becomes increasingly difficult to surprise. Governments waste money; politicians posture; consultants prosper. Yet even a seasoned observer of human folly must occasionally pause and marvel at the sheer inventive uselessness of certain public expenditures. The latest gem from the Starmer administration is a £108,000 taxpayer-funded report entitled—brace yourself—Improving the Ethnic Diversity of Visitors to England’s Protected Landscapes. Yes, dear reader, while businesses shutter along the high street and energy bills climb to heights that would make Edmund Hillary blanch, the government has identified the pressing national emergency: not enough ethnic minorities are picnicking in the Lake District.

The report, produced with all the solemnity of a papal encyclical, informs us that Black Britons visit the countryside at roughly half the rate of their white compatriots. This disparity, we are assured, is a problem demanding immediate and expensive intervention. Suggestions include “inclusive outreach,” staff training in cultural sensitivity, and—my personal favourite—making rural pubs less intimidating to people who have never set foot in one. One pictures the consultants descending upon some ancient coaching inn in the Yorkshire Dales, clipboard in hand, explaining to a fourth-generation landlord that the absence of quinoa on the menu may constitute a micro-aggression. It is, of course, entirely possible that certain ethnic-minority citizens simply do not wish to spend their weekends trudging through mud in pursuit of a view of some sheep. This possibility is not entertained. To suggest that people might have differing recreational preferences would be to commit the cardinal sin of treating them as individuals rather than demographic categories. Far better to assume that the countryside itself is quietly racist and must be re-educated.

The deeper absurdity lies in the unspoken premise: that the English countryside, that patchwork of hedgerows, drystone walls and quiet villages, is somehow incomplete without a government-approved quota of urban visitors. Middle England—those unassuming towns and rural parishes that have somehow survived Cromwell, the Industrial Revolution and the Blitz—is now deemed in need of improvement by a cadre of metropolitan civil servants who regard anything beyond Zone 3 as anthropological terra incognita. One suspects that the true objection is not to the ethnic composition of ramblers but to the lingering suspicion that the countryside remains stubbornly resistant to progressive refurbishment. It is still possible, in some forgotten corner of Dorset, to enjoy a pint without being lectured on one’s carbon footprint or unconscious bias.

And so we have Keir Starmer’s Britain: a country in which the urgent task of national renewal apparently begins with ensuring that every National Park reflects the demographic mosaic of London SW1. Meanwhile, the actual inhabitants of rural England—farmers, publicans, small shopkeepers—watch their costs soar and their margins vanish, untroubled by any comparable outpouring of official concern. One begins to understand why the Prime Minister, a man whose facial expression seems permanently fixed in the mild disappointment of a vegetarian offered a rare steak, inspires so little enthusiasm. He embodies the modern liberal mindset in its purest form: a boundless confidence that every aspect of national life can and should be managed from the centre, provided the management is sufficiently well-meaning and expensively credentialed.

There is, naturally, no suggestion that the £108,000 might have been better spent on, say, keeping a rural post office open or subsidising a bus route that actually exists. Such measures would be vulgarly practical. They would lack the ennobling sheen of moral grandstanding. Far preferable to commission a report whose recommendations will gather dust on a server somewhere, its authors safely returned to their consultancies, while the government can claim to be “taking action” on an issue that affects precisely no one who has ever had to choose between heating and eating.

Clive James once observed that the problem with political correctness is not that it is politically incorrect to say so, but that it is simply dull. This initiative is dullness elevated to policy. It is the administrative equivalent of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic while insisting that the real problem is the insufficient diversity of the deckchair fabric. Middle England, already battered by net-zero zealotry and planning liberalisation, now finds itself the target of yet another well-intentioned assault upon its quiet, unassuming way of life. One almost longs for the blunt incompetence of previous administrations; at least it lacked the sanctimonious gloss.

In the end, the report will change nothing. The countryside will remain gloriously, stubbornly itself—wet, windy and indifferent to government targets. A few more consultants will have paid their mortgages. And Sir Keir Starmer will continue to preside over a nation that increasingly wonders whether the chief qualification for modern leadership is the ability to identify new and inventive ways to spend other people’s money on problems that do not exist. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the real protected landscape in need of preservation is not the Peak District, but the dwindling remnant of common sense.

THE CHILL WIND OF COMPLIANCE

There is a sense of terror hanging over the UK, or so Alice Smith assures us in one of those terse pronouncements that X specialises in delivering. People, she says, are scared to say what they see, scared to voice their true opinions, scared to lose their jobs, their pensions, their liberty. And it’s only getting worse. This, she concludes with the crisp finality of a guillotine falling, is what socialism does to a country. One pictures Miss Smith – great-great-great-granddaughter of Adam Smith, no less, a lineage she wears like a badge of hereditary indignation – typing these words in a dimly lit room somewhere in the Home Counties, pausing only to glance over her shoulder in case the Thought Police have already installed a webcam in the teapot. It is a vivid image, and one that invites us to consider the peculiar British talent for turning existential dread into a polite whisper. Terror, of course, is a strong word. In the old days we reserved it for the Blitz, or the prospect of a nuclear winter, or – if one were particularly sensitive – the arrival of a restaurant bill in a foreign currency. 

Nowadays it seems to describe the sensation of wondering whether that perfectly reasonable remark about immigration levels might cost one the annual performance bonus. The terror is not of tanks rolling down the Mall but of an email from Human Resources, phrased in the soothing tones of corporate pastoral care: “We would like to invite you to a conversation about inclusivity.” How did we arrive here? The journey has been gradual, almost courteous, like a butler easing a guest towards the door while insisting that it is entirely the guest’s idea to leave. There was the Online Safety Act, that magnificent piece of legislation which promised to make the internet a safer place for children and promptly set about making it a safer place for ministers’ reputations. Platforms must now remove 'harmful' content or face fines large enough to make even a tech billionaire blink. 

And who defines 'harmful'? Why, the same people who brought you the equality impact assessment and the net-zero target – civil servants with clipboards and a profound faith in the redemptive power of bureaucracy. The beauty of the Act, from the government’s point of view, is its elegance. No need for midnight knocks on the door when the platforms themselves will do the knocking – or rather, the muting, the shadow-banning, the quiet disappearance of inconvenient opinions into the digital equivalent of a locked filing cabinet. Self-censorship is so much more efficient than state censorship. It enlists the victim as accomplice. One does not need a Ministry of Truth when the citizens are willing to edit themselves in real time, like overzealous sub-editors trimming their own prose for fear of offending the style guide.

Keir Starmer, that most lawyerly of prime ministers, presides over this transformation with the serene expression of a man who believes due process is something that happens to other people. He speaks of kindness, of building a Britain where no one is left behind, and one detects the faint echo of every well-meaning authoritarian since time immemorial. The kindness is compulsory, you understand. The inclusivity is non-negotiable. And if you object – well, there are procedures. Forms to fill out. Investigations to endure. The slow, patient grinding of gears that leaves the complainant wishing they had never complained in the first place. And now, fresh from his triumphant jaunt to Beijing – the first by a British prime minister in eight years, no less – Sir Keir returns with tales of pragmatic engagement and sophisticated relationships. One imagines him strolling through Shanghai's Yuyuan Gardens, sipping tea in historic pavilions, while back home the citizenry practises the art of saying nothing at all. He met President Xi, of course, for hours of frank dialogue, emerging with agreements on visa-free travel (how generous: Britons may now visit the People's Republic for up to thirty days without the bother of paperwork), reduced tariffs on whisky, and assorted pacts in green tech and finance. All very grown-up, very realistic. One must engage with the world's second-largest economy, after all; pragmatism demands it.

Yet there is something touchingly ironic in the spectacle of a leader who oversees the quiet stifling of dissent at home rushing eastward to court a regime that has elevated censorship to an industrial art form. In China, the Great Firewall blocks inconvenient truths with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine; social credit systems monitor and punish deviation; and the Party's grip ensures that terror is not a whisper but a shout, albeit one that echoes in empty stadiums. Starmer, ever the lawyer, speaks of "meaningful dialogue on areas where we disagree," which presumably includes human rights, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs – subjects raised, one supposes, with the delicate firmness of a man negotiating the price of Scotch. Meanwhile, even Donald Trump – not known for subtlety – pipes up from across the Atlantic to call the whole affair "very dangerous," prompting Sir Keir to shrug it off with the mild suggestion that the President was probably thinking of Canada.

The visit, we are told, is in the national interest: jobs, growth, opportunities for British business. Fair enough; one cannot eat principles, and the Treasury is not famed for its vegetarianism. But the timing adds a certain piquancy to Miss Smith's lament. As pensioners huddle in the cold and citizens weigh every word for potential offence, the Prime Minister demonstrates that engagement with authoritarians is fine when there's trade on the table. The chill wind of compliance blows stronger than ever, now seasoned with a hint of oriental pragmatism. Meanwhile the country carries on, because that is what Britain does best. Queues form politely outside food banks. Pensioners turn down the heating and tell pollsters they are 'managing.' Immigrants arrive in numbers that would have made previous generations gasp, and the subject is discussed in the careful euphemisms of people who have learned that certain words are radioactive. The economy creaks under the weight of taxes that rise like the tide, relentless and indifferent. And through it all runs the quiet terror of which Miss Smith speaks – not the terror of revolution but of repercussion.

One is reminded – how could one not be? – of Orwell, that prophet who understood Britain better than most Britons ever have. Orwell knew that the English variety of totalitarianism would not announce itself with jackboots but with clipboard-wielding officials and a smothering solicitude. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In modern Britain we are encouraged to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears not by brute force but by the gentle pressure of social conformity and the threat of professional ruin. It is softer, more civilised, and therefore infinitely more difficult to resist – though perhaps Sir Keir picked up a few pointers on making it firmer during his Eastern excursion.

There are, of course, those who insist that nothing has changed. Free speech is alive and well, they say; one may still criticise the government, provided one does so in the correct tone and with due regard for the feelings of others. One may still notice patterns in crime statistics, as long as one prefaces the observation with a ritual disclaimer about the essential goodness of humanity. One may even vote for alternative parties, though one should be prepared for the subsequent media scrutiny of one’s character and associations. Freedom, in this view, is not the absence of consequences but the presence of guidelines – guidelines that, coincidentally, align rather neatly with the preferences of those in power.

And yet the chill is real. One senses it in conversations that trail off when certain subjects arise. One sees it in the careful phrasing of public statements, the sudden proliferation of phrases like “I’m not saying all…” and “Some of my best friends…” One hears it in the silence that follows a controversial remark – not the silence of agreement but the silence of calculation. People are weighing risks. They are performing the mental arithmetic of modern British life: Is this opinion worth the potential cost? Socialism, Miss Smith declares, does this to a country. The word is flung like a hand grenade, and in certain circles it explodes with satisfying force. Yet the phenomenon is larger than any single ideology. What we are witnessing is the convergence of managerial progressivism and corporate risk-aversion, seasoned with a dash of old-fashioned British busyness-about-other-people’s-business – and now, apparently, a splash of realpolitik imported from the East. 

The result is a society that polices itself with an efficiency that would have made the Stasi weep with envy, though perhaps they would have preferred the Chinese model for its scale. There will, one supposes, come a reckoning. History suggests that people will endure a great deal before they push back, but endurance has limits. The British are slow to anger, yet when they do finally stir they tend to do so with a certain methodical thoroughness. One thinks of the Chartists, the suffragettes, the poll tax rioters – movements that began with quiet grievances and ended with the established order discovering, to its surprise, that the worm had turned.

For now, though, the terror persists. It is a quiet terror, a middle-class terror, a terror that apologises for itself even as it grips the heart. It is the terror of a nation that has traded the robust vulgarity of genuine disagreement for the polished veneer of enforced consensus – a consensus lately burnished in Beijing. And in the evenings, as the lights dim and the heating clicks off early to save money, one can almost hear the ghosts of older, freer Britons – Johnson, Mill, Orwell himself – turning in their graves with the weary sigh of those who warned us, all those years ago, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and that the alternative is a silence so complete it can be heard across an entire island, perhaps even as far as the Great Wall.