David Maddox: Only a pawn in their game

Forget Obama, Brown and Gaddafi at the UN, the SNP's plans to liberate Scottish television from the BBC and especially Nick Clegg's speech, the news this week that Garry Kasparov and Anatoli Karpov are to resume hostilities over the chess board to mark 25 years after their first epic encounter was for me the story of the week.

It brought back memories of how as a 10-year-old fanatical chess player (sadly never better than a Norfolk county finalist) I avidly followed what became one of the greatest mental contests in human history (pictured above). As this week has shown it is one that will only end when one of the two grandmasters finds that his next opponent is the grim reaper in a Seventh Seal or, for the less high brow, a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure fashion.
It also reminded me of a conversation I had with James Mackenzie, the Greens spindoctor and general dogsbody famous for his Two Doctors blog, about board games.
He is a collector of weird and wonderful board games and I believe has one with the aim of nuking the world, which perhaps isn't the Greenest objective.
But he is also a keen backgammon player and is teaching Green MSP Patrick Harvie how to play. Unfortunately he does not like chess and in a recent e-mail to me said: "Chess is a limited game which can be won simply by processing further into the future than your opponent."
A surprising observation for an otherwise intelligent and cultured individual about arguably the greatest test of mental skill ever devised.
But, getting back to Kasparov and Karpov, what has this rematch of the old grandmasters got to do with politics? Well actually quite a lot.
In 1984, five years before the Iron Curtain fell, this was a contest between the old and the new. Karpov was the Communist Party's establishment man, appropriately a strategist who strangled his opponents with carefully worked out positions. Kasparov represented the new Russia, pro-capitalist and pushing for freedom, which again was reflected in his faster, more flamboyant unpredictable style of play.
The two were enemies over the board, personally and politically. Their enmity was such that a board had to be fixed under the table to stop them kicking each other.
Initially, as with the old Communist regime, Karpov had the upper hand, but the match was abandoned when he was 5-3 up because the two were deadlocked in constant draws and there were fears for their health.
Then in 1985 they returned for a rematch and, in what would eventually reflect the new order, Kasparov won easily. He never lost a match to Karpov again although they clashed many times.
Kasparov actually went on to get involved in politics as an opponent of the Putin regime. After he was arrested following a demonstration it was interesting that one of his first visitors in prison was his old rival Karpov, showing that respect for a great opponent overcomes enmity and differences of opinion.
But their contest a quarter of a century ago was not the first to have a political dimension. Before Karpov became world champion, the American Bobby Fischer became the first man to overcome Soviet domination of the chess world when he beat Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 (pictured below), in contest that was loaded with Cold War politics.
Fischer is the one player who could lay claim to be on a level with Kasparov and Karpov as one of the greatest players ever. But he reportedly went mad and walked away from the game after winning in 1972 only to re-emerge years later apparently supporting the unpalatable Serbian regime in the 1990s.
He once described chess as "war on a board" but was not the only one to give it a dimension of reflecting life and politics.
The former US President Benjamin Franklin said: “Life is a kind of Chess, with struggle, competition, good and ill events.”
Although as Arthur Conan Doyle noted it is not always a good thing. He said: “Excellence at Chess is one mark of a scheming mind.”
Which brings me back to my conversation with James Mackenzie. The Greens have at times shown a certain endearing innocence when it comes to the darker arts of politics, not least in their hopeless budget negotiations earlier this year.
So, taking some Holmesian authoritive advice, perhaps Mr Mackenzie should be teaching his MSPs how to position their pawns rather than relying on the random throw of the backgammon dice.