Illustration by David Foldvari.

One of the joys of cricket as a spectator sport is that, every so often, you get to see people in a role for which they are not at all well suited. This is rare in professional sport where, in general, all participants are doing something they're so unthinkably good at, displaying such unimaginable levels of skill, that onlookers' attempts at empathy for the players' specific aims and problems are rendered absurd. Very few of us haranguing Andy Murray for an errant backhand from the comfort of our living rooms do so without a slight twinkle of self-mockery. But that's not always needed with cricket, because bowlers have to bat.

Some bowlers are very good at batting but others are really not. Many are not nearly good enough to do so professionally and a rare few, despite all the practice they put in, display less aptitude than an average member of the public. And yet they sometimes have to face top-class professional bowling. This can be brilliantly funny and nail-bitingly dramatic and occasionally, in a way even HBO hasn't mastered, a combination of the two. When a team is in a tight spot and a gangly fast bowler is required to score some runs, or conserve his wicket, in the face of an opposing fast bowler's most ferocious deliveries, it's like a slapstick comedy, an exhilarating thriller with an everyman protagonist, and a classic episode of The Generation Game combined. It makes for enthralling viewing.

Another entertaining figure flailing against a pace attack with no observable hand-eye co-ordination is the Earl of Cardigan. The 60-year-old aristocrat is currently living on benefits in a lodge on his family estate, of which he is struggling to regain control. He's just had a baby with his second wife, but his daughter by his first marriage has a restraining order out on him and he's also not in contact with his son – "which is a great sadness to me," he says. But his main concern is to stop his estate's trustees from selling Tottenham House, the ancestral home. "We built it in 1820 and have owned the dirt it was built on since the Normans… It is my job to hand it on to the next generation" – if they deign to get back in touch.

As 31st hereditary warden of Savernake Forest, this is a role Cardigan was born to – but sadly only in the literal not the idiomatic sense, as he seems to be useless at it. It's difficult to be sure, since the aristocracy are so assiduous in compensating for the material advantages their children receive by giving them psyche-wreckingly unpleasant upbringings, but one can't help suspecting that the current earl has played a good hand rather poorly over the last few decades. Still, you can't question his sincerity.

The posh don't have a monopoly on ill-fitting roles: I don't think Paul Dacre is particularly posh and Rupert Murdoch, being Australian, is off the whole posh/not posh graph. Yet this unlikely pair are the most prominent in a band of have-a-go heroes who are charged with protecting Britain's ancient principle of freedom of speech. They could hardly be worse suited to the task. They're extremely controversial, somewhat shadowy figures and few believe they would act out of anything other than ruthless self-interest. Now, obviously, their self-interest and the public interest aren't necessarily in conflict merely because they have been on numerous occasions in the past. But that's a delicate argument to make and neither is renowned for his diplomacy.

Fun though their crackpot quest sounds, the situation is potentially grave. All three main political parties have collaborated with a pressure group that campaigns against press intrusion on a form of regulation that is underpinned by parliamentary authority – their proposed royal charter could only be amended by two-thirds majorities in both houses – which means by politicians. It would definitely be giving politicians power over the press, maybe only in a small way, but certainly in an unprecedented way. And most of the press hate it.

"Well, they would, wouldn't they," you might say. "But there's a cross-party consensus in favour of it: all the politicians like it." Well, they would, wouldn't they, is my response. The press's own pitch of an alternative charter was turned down by a subcommittee of the privy council (the medieval body that deals with charters and privies and dragons and the like). This particular subcommittee consisted solely of seven coalition ministers – so the plan was stopped by seven advocates of the alternative plan, seven government politicians. If that's how regulation of the press is to be conducted from now on, we all need to start shitting ourselves.

There's a general feeling that something had to be done about all the phone hacking and harassment but, as Ian Hislop said recently, things have been done: "They closed down the biggest newspaper in the country. Scores of people have been arrested… lots of people are being prosecuted. It's a big result." And the main issue that people were shocked by – phone hacking – was already illegal. The police failure to enforce that law shouldn't really have any bearing on the regulation of what the press is permitted to print.

The trouble is that the press, particularly the tabloid press, has made itself so loathed that they're difficult people to defend or sympathise with. Many of them deserved a comeuppance, so it's easy to focus on the nasty people having a nasty time and ignore the potentially disastrous collateral damage to our ancient freedom to say, write and print what we like without any permission or official sanction.

Murdoch and Dacre are bowlers desperately wielding bats, the last people the cause of freedom should be relying on. It would be fun to watch if I didn't care so much about the result. They're the worst possible poster boys for a free press but that doesn't mean they're wrong about this and we mustn't be distracted into seeing the debate tribally: "Whose gang are you in – the Daily Mail's or Milly Dowler's?" Many of the people currently deriving a living from the tabloid industry may well deserve ruin, but their unmerited prosperity is a price worth paying for the continued function of an accountable democracy.