What Exactly is a Gentleman's Agreement?

According to one of the most famous one-liners attributed to Sam Goldwyn (or the US baseball legend Yogi Berra; it depends who you ask), an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. What, then, of the "gentleman’s agreement" made in 1998, between the government and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), that was supposed to guarantee the survival of Test cricket on free-to-air TV? MPs warned this week that the board’s decision to renege on the agreement - by giving exclusive rights to BSkyB - might be the "death knell" for free live cricket on TV. But do they have any business getting angry?

The problem with a "gentleman’s agreement", apart from its gloriously anachronistic name, is that it derives its force from the notion of personal honor. It evokes country houses, Elizabethan ruffs, and the settlement of disagreements by duel. But in the world of government and big-money sports, where formal contracts are commonplace, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would reach such an agreement unless they specifically wanted to leave open an escape-hatch. To complicate matters further, neither of the gentlemen concerned - culture secretary Chris Smith and ECB boss Lord Maclaurin - are in their jobs any more, so the board could argue that the deal is no longer binding.

Historically, though, gentleman’s agreements weren’t necessarily intended to be weaker than formal ones. Witness Hitler’s agreement with Neville Chamberlain: Hitler, obviously, would have felt no more obliged to abide by that deal if it had involved a legal contract. But Chamberlain, perhaps with the naivety of a former English era, seems to have believed that an appeal to honor might have worked - that whatever else the German dictator might do, he’d never dream of proving himself ungentlemanly.

Many decades on, it’s hard to imagine anyone being sufficiently steeped in the culture of gentlemanliness to put their faith in it. The government presumably settled for the cricket deal because the board wouldn’t give any firmer guarantee. MPs’ anger is naive, but understandable. Plainly, only one option is left: Chris Smith must challenge Lord Maclaurin to a duel.