Whatever Andy Murray decides to do when he stops playing tennis, queueing up for a job with either of the major parties going toe to toe for the keys to 10 Downing Street this week might not be high on his list of options. Nevertheless, the Scot – who favoured independence in the 2014 referendum and probably would do so again, if given the chance – has an acute social conscience, and he will not be joining the many millionaires in his sport who have chosen to register as tax exiles.

The world No1 – who is two wins away from reaching the French Open final for the second year in a row – spends little more than a month of the year at his home in Oxshott, the semi-rural idyll favoured by stockbrokers and City workers, so he has every excuse to move abroad. The quiet, pleasant patch of north Surrey is a half-hour drive from Wimbledon and has been a welcome retreat for him and his young family during the championships, a rare few weeks away from the hotels on the global tennis circuit.

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Because of the travelling demands of his sport, Murray – who has career earnings of nearly $60m, a healthy portfolio to top that up and a luxury apartment in Miami, his winter training base – could legitimately live anywhere. Indeed, among his peers, half of the world’s top 20 have used just such circumstances to justify living in low-tax havens.

Monte Carlo is home to Novak Djokovic, Milos Raonic, Marin Cilic, Alexander Zverev, David Goffin, Grigor Dimitrov and Tomas Berdych, while Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gaël Monfils live in Switzerland, and Lucas Pouille is based in Dubai. However, as Murray said after his quick but testing win over the next “big thing” in Russian tennis, Karen Khachanov: “I like living at home. The only chance of me living somewhere else is if I had a bunch of friends or some of my family were living elsewhere and I would move to spend time with them. But I wouldn’t want to go and live somewhere not to pay any tax and not to have any of my family and friends around me. I wouldn’t do that.”

Murray always votes even though his constituency, Esher and Walton, is among the safest in the country for the Conservatives. He said he has kept an eye on the political debates before Thursday’s general election – his choice is sealed in the postal votes he and his wife, Kim, have despatched to reach the returning officer.

“We’ve watched pretty much all of them,” he said. “With the team, we watched Sky News. We didn’t watch the ITV debate, which didn’t have Corbyn or Theresa May. Then we watched the BBC one. So I’ve tried to keep up with it as much as possible.”

After his match on Court Philippe Chatrier on Monday, Murray also demonstrated that he has a social conscience and sense of the wider world that sometimes escapes celebrity athletes when, as the game’s leading player, he agreed to address the crowd with a brief and moving statement about the London Bridge terrorist attack.

“I try to follow as much of what’s going on back home as I can,” he said. “When something like that happens, it doesn’t matter where it is, that gets reported. There was a terrorist attack in Manila a few days ago, but maybe it didn’t get as much coverage as stuff in Europe.”

For now, he has to direct his energies towards handling Kei Nishikori on Wednesday. “Certainly I feel fresher than last year,” Murray said. “The start of that tournament was pretty tough. I didn’t play well in the first couple of rounds and they were hard matches. I got lucky that I ended up playing [John] Isner and [Ivo] Karlovic back to back, as they were not physical matches, really, after the first couple of rounds [each of which went five sets]. I came in then playing a lot of tennis – so the body probably feels a little bit better now than it did last year.”

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Nishikori, whose match against Fernando Verdasco on Monday was his third in as many days because of the shifting schedule, was right to describe the 0-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-0 scoreline as, “a little bit unusual”. He explained later: “This court’s bounce was really high, he was using very heavy forehand and I was running side to side. I couldn’t do anything first set but I tried to play a little more heavy and a little more aggressive, and it started to work a bit better. Still, it was really, really tough battle. There was so many long rallies, second and third sets. Physically, I’m OK.”

While Djokovic has soldiered on here since Monday without the attention of his celebrity coach, Andre Agassi (who left as soon as he had fulfilled commercial obligations with a coffee company), Murray is happy to be reunited with Ivan Lendl after three months. “It sounds simple but it is not,” he said of resuming the regime with his valued mentor. “A lot of the time when things are not going well you start over-thinking things. You start wanting to try new things on the practice court, changing tensions in your racket. You think all sorts of things to work out what is going wrong.

“But the one thing we did when Ivan got here, we went right back to the basics. The drills we were doing were all pretty simple drills. We spent a lot of time on the court. We hit lots of balls – no time in the gym, really. It was just tennis, plain tennis, and literally getting back to doing the basics right, making a lot of balls, making myself difficult to beat.

“And then, once you start to do that, you get through a couple of matches, you start feeling better, your confidence grows. It can be right down here [gesturing low with his hands], and it can go right up here pretty quickly. That has been the case so far this tournament.”

Murray’s midsummer high point – and a month of sleeping in his own bed – is not far away. He has already restored much of his bruised confidence after an ordinary clay-court campaign. If he does well in the second week here, he will be in the best possible heart to defend his title at Wimbledon. Home for Murray has always been where the hearth is.