Peter Oborne has all the markings of an old-model actor, the rugged, roguish kind who looks like he belongs on the back of a horse in a Sam Shepherd movie, and seems to lack that 21st century gene that makes movie stars care whether they are liked or not.

Known as King George in the world of journalism, a fact that has as much to do with his ability to negotiate the bulls and the bears as it does his innate understanding of the science of choice - those intangible forces that make people do what they do, and the internal logic that drives them.

Peter Alan Oborne was educated at Sherborne School and read history at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of highly critical biographies, Alastair Campbell: New Labour and the Rise of the Middle Class and Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy - The Untold Story.

As a television journalist, he’s made three documentaries with Paul Yule: Mugabe’s Secret Famine, Afghanistan: Here’s One We Invaded Earlier, and Not Cricket - The Basil D’Oliveira Conspiracy.

In 2005, he presented Why Politicians Can’t Tell the Truth and in 2008, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim, arguing that the demonisation of Muslims has become widespread in British media and politics.

Oborne’s interest in cultural diversity has produced a remarkably shrewd, curious, and tactful mind and an openness to abrupt changes in strategy that made writing a book on cricket in Pakistan and brown fascination with whiteness far more pleasant and less volatile than it would have been in more conventional authorial hands. Wounded Tiger is in equal measure memoir, history, and political analysis. It is written - elegantly - from a perspective whose breadth virtually no other observer of cricket could hope to match.

He spoke to The News on Sunday at the Lahore Literary Festival 2015 about taming the wounded tiger. Excerpts follow:

The News on Sunday (TNS): You’ve been trained as a journalist by vocation. How did your very first sortie into the world of cricket come about?

Peter Oborne (PO): When I was a little boy I loved Basil D’ Oliveira. He was my schoolboy hero! His story was quite moving because he was the only non-White South African player under Apartheid, and a great cricket genius but he was never allowed to play on first class grounds or even on decent grounds - just on muddy tracks. He was only allowed to play non-White cricket under Apartheid as opposed to first class cricket. Even though there were leagues, nobody recognised them, and although he was known for making great innings, nobody knew about them.

There is a story about how he escaped and came out of Apartheid at the time when it was most evil and intense, and came to England way later in his life when he was playing cricket in his early 30s. He wrote a letter to John Arlott, the great cricket broadcaster of all times, out of the blue, in Greenwich, asking him: "I want to play cricket in England - I can’t play here."

With great difficulty, Arlott arranges for him to play on the league side. It makes a great difference. D’ Oliveira arrives in England in difficult times: it is wet and cold, and he has never been to England before. He has a terrible struggle but he comes through. Then he comes out of the League into the first class game and plays for England. That is the ‘moment of destiny’ because the minute he is chosen to play England, the question arises: Will he be chosen for England against South Africa?

As he comes out of South Africa as a first class cricketer, he’s disputing Apartheid, which says that the Black Man is inferior. From that moment on, the South African government looks through the archives and tries to bribe him not to come back. It succeeds in convincing the MCC not to choose him.

It’s an amazing story because it taught the English about the evil of Apartheid and led to the exclusion of South Africa from world sport. In other words, it played a major role in the ending of Apartheid.

Later in my life when I became a journalist, I wrote to D’ Oliveira saying: "I want to write a book about you." Forty years ago, I went back to him, and I am still very proud of that book.

TNS: Between the documentary on D’ Oliveira and Wounded Tiger, there’s a long lapse of time. What brought you back to the subject that had you write a monograph on cricket in Pakistan?

PO: I started to work on Pakistani cricket when I learnt about the splendid role of Pakistan in combating Apartheid in cricket. A.H. Kardar, the first Pakistani cricket captain was, by then, the Chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board. He challenged the authority of the White Cricketers’ establishment by wanting to keep South Africa in world sport. So, Pakistan played a very noble role under Kardar who was operating as a representative of the Bhutto government.

I am really a political journalist. Even though I was writing on politics, including books about politics and foreign affairs, I started to report from Pakistan.

Wherever you go in Pakistan, you see people playing in the street, on the road, in the field. Pakistan is poorly understood in the rest of the world and so is Pakistani cricket. I wanted to write about cricket in Pakistan as a way of understanding Pakistan itself. I thought writing this book would take a year or two but it took me exactly four years. I came back here, may be a dozen times, but would spend only two weeks in a row, researching.

TNS: You resigned from daily The Telegraph on February 17, 2015, in a strongly worded letter. What contributed to this sudden decision?

PO: I am a conservative journalist. I was the Chief Correspondent of The Telegraph. I’d been the Chief Political Commentator for about four and a half years. For me journalism is many things but it is also a moral activity. One of the sacred things about quality journalism is that the advertisers or commercial considerations cannot interfere with the reporter’s job to convey the truth, and I started to see evidence that The Telegraph was allowing advertisers to affect news judgments. The particular case that caused me to go public was the HSBC case where the allegations of wrongdoing in Switzerland were being downplayed - The Telegraph hid them. At that moment, I thought no conscience could remain quiet about it. So I wrote a long piece published on a website called Open Democracy.

TNS: There’s a whole library of books written on cricket in South East Asia, notably by authors like Ramachandra Guha (A Corner of a Foreign Field), Ashish Nandy (Tao of Cricket), Emma Levine (Into the Passionate Soul of Subcontinental Cricket) and Sujit Mukherjee (Autobiography of an Unknown Indian Cricketer), to name but few. How is Wounded Tiger any distinctive compared to the aforementioned books?

PO: Ramachandra Guha’s book is a very good book. It’s about Indian cricket. Guha is a great historian; he’s written a massive book but he doesn’t deal with Pakistan. On the whole, he’s not sympathetic to Pakistan. I felt two things: one that there was relatively little work done specifically on Pakistani cricket. Osman Samiuddin has just published a superb book. I really wanted to bring in the nation-building aspect and the political element into the book; secondly, I wanted to know who was Hanif Mohammad, and where did he come from; or for that matter, who was A.H. Kardar?

The other problem I wanted to confront was that in England, I find cricket writing in England about Pakistan very bad because there’s a tendency to misrepresent Pakistan. For example, Javed Miandad is often portrayed in English writing as a ‘cheat’. Miandad is not a cheat - he’s a splendid man, and one of the greatest batsmen there’s ever been. Because he had a different approach - reverse swing - what came as a great Pakistani moment – it was represented by the English writers as cheating. It was a great new technical invention, probably the most important since over-arm bowling. So I wanted to show how cricket reporting in the rest of the world had been driven by prejudice or by a sense of Western supremacy.

Cricket in Pakistan has been most brilliant and exciting, and over the last 30 years, Pakistan has been one of the most inventive cricketing nations in the world with brilliant players. Take Abdul Qadir, for instance, who reinvented wrist spinning. It’s an amazing thing, and he does it on his own. He’s the son of a poor cleric who somehow invents almost a new art form. Well, he ‘reinvents’ an old art form, but, as such, it’s a new art form.

TNS: What is your stance vis-à-vis the role of nationalism in the sport of cricket?

PO: Boria Majumdar has done some wonderful work in this domain. He’s brought to light old documents and archives which weren’t there before. Indian cricket has a distinct trajectory than Pakistani one. Indian cricket began as a collaborationist sport; it is part of the English Imperial method of rule. It was sponsored by major feudals who wanted to use cricket as a way of ingratiating themselves with the viceroy or it’s a manifestation of that. It is, in addition, built around trading areas, such as Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, etc. It was a way of roping in first of all the Parsis, then the Hindus, and finally the Muslims, shaped by what the Pakistanis call the first War of Independence. Only the Muslims joined in very late. The Pentangular was designed around sectarian grounds.

Pakistani cricket is different: Pakistan’s relationship with the British Empire didn’t begin as a trading relationship. It began through conquest. You get the first cricket match in what is now Pakistan, near Karachi, in 1841 or 1842, after Napier’s arrival. After that, you can trace the first cricket match in Lahore in 1847, based around the garrisons. It excluded the Afridis, to begin with.

Afridis were brawling with the Englishmen in 1880s. They were hard as net bowlers! Their ancestors were hired by the British officers to throw balls up.

The importance of it is that cricket emerges in Karachi not as a collaborationist enterprise but as a revolutionary enterprise. It was associated with the Muslim League from the start. It was a form of national assertion. Aitchison College, for instance, plays no role in the early history of cricket in Pakistan. The clique college is Government College, and, most of all, Islamia College. The latter is where cricket really started in Pakistan, and, as you’d know, it was rated by the English as a highly subversive organisation. The great Fazal Mehmood would be a bodyguard for Jinnah when the latter went to Islamia College.

TNS: Do you see cricket as a core cultural marker?

PO: If you want to understand the socio-cultural development of Pakistan in the last 100 years, going back before Partition to the beginning of Pakistan Movement, and then to Pakistan since Independence, cricket has played a very big role in the way Pakistanis see themselves today. It’s also played a very big role in bringing Pakistanis together. Pakistan is a very diverse place - all kinds of different regions, cultures, customs, classes, castes, and one of the things that unites the tribesmen of the North West Frontier and the farmers of Sindh, the middle-class in Lahore and the gangsters in Karachi, is cricket. It brings them all together to cheer on the national team. It forges a common language and common heroes. Afridi is a Pathan but he’s much appreciated in Lahore; likewise, Mushtaq Mohammad and Hanif Mohammad were mohajirs but they were heroes of people in tribal areas.

I have explained in my book the way cricket expanded from a very thinly based middle class game to a sport. At the time of Independence, it was largely located in the two centres of Karachi and Lahore, and how, particularly since 1980, it has massively spread to the rural areas, and into regional centres like Multan, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur, etc. All of this expansion has been a cultural expansion because it belonged merely to the very small elite that spoke English at the time of Partition. The radio was in English for a very long time. Gradually, it gets to a very interesting moment in history when you start the Urdu commentary. It was a rather interesting question as to how English terms as ‘LBW’, ‘stumped’ and ‘bowling’ would go into Urdu? It became a game that went beyond the English-speaking country to an Urdu-speaking country, not just for the middle class but also for all classes.

TNS: What has been the role of the clubs, particularly the Pentangulars, in nurturing the sport of cricket in the subcontinent?

PO: In the subcontinent, the Pentangular is very important, particularly in Bombay. In Pakistan, they were much less important. There were Pentangulars in Pakistan that started in the 1920s in Karachi, and later Lahore, but they weren’t significant. Much more significant in Pakistan was the role of the clubs, in particular in Lahore, two most important daily clubs were the Crescent Club founded by an insurgent middle class, and the Mamdot Cricket Club which was a feudal club. There was a big class divide. That is really where Pakistan cricket first found its soul. Bhutto played for Mamdot whereas Jinnah played for Crescent.

Until 1947, Gymkhana was British, so it inherits some of the imperial apparatus. It is one of the most beautiful club grounds in the world, and one of the most important clubs because test cricket was played here.