AS a now semi-detached observer of golf, a game which is thankfully unburdened by the debilitating description of beautiful, I'm increasingly struck by the gleeful stampede to inflict negative verdicts on it. To be sure, the wounds so gratuitously inflicted have all too often been needlessly of the suicidal type.

These range from the issue of single sex, or at any rate restricted, membership of clubs to the clothing fashion decrees as naff by the style gurus who would dictate such matters, to the exception taken by a club official to the youngster competing in a family foursomes competition being the adopted rather than the natural son of his mother.

Raising one's head above the parapet of what passes for political correctness in these nervous 90's to suggest only that a club exists for the benefit of its members, of whatever sex or stripe, not as an example to society's conduct, I see help arriving from the most unexpected of quarters.

As we learned last week, Tony Blair has been introduced to the game often described as humbling and therefore in direct contradiction to his political character. However, given that the Prime Minister's inductee was his soulmate, President Bill Clinton, golfers generally should perhaps be wary of this Damascene conversion.

To be fair, though, it seems that Blair has flair, as indeed have a number of his fellow-Fettesians deployed over the years. Clinton allowed that ''it was embarrassing how good he was.'' The novice modestly responded: ''It was beginner's luck,'' and then with perhaps prophetic emphasis added, ''a bit like politics''.

And this after it was revealed that Blair's predecessor, the hapless John Major, had decided to take golf seriously. What a healthy diversion from his support of Chelsea and Surrey and one which might have stood him in good stead in office to take his mind thoroughly off those Illegitimates of whom he famously complained.

Golf and politics have for long enough been, pardon the allusion, bedfellows. Balfour, Lloyd George, Asquith and Macmillan were premier players. On the other hand Churchill, Baldwin, Attlee, Eden and Heath were non golfers and Mrs Thatcher transferred allegiance to her husband.

One suspects that during those febrile years Mr Thatcher's equilibrium was sustained not just by liberal infusions of the appropriate liquors, but by the merciful release from matters of state, albeit of the consort variety, afforded by the broad and health acres of the nearest golf course.

The marvellous revenge which golf so frequently achieves over its chattering-class critics is always worth waiting for. The squirming acknowledgement that the game actually appeals to some idol of rock or pop, hitherto regarded as a rebel against anything a middle class activity stands for, is wondrous to behold.

Lord knows how many icons of in-your-face irreverence are, behind closed doors, secretly indulging in another form of drug abuse. For one, during last winter it became known that none other than Bob Dylan, he of the wailing sinuses, had taken up the game. What sense, what maturity in this coming out.

A mixture of outrage and disbelief followed. How could this almost mythological figure of popular culture take to the reality of a game seen as essentially bourgeois, middle aged and embedded in the suburbs? Kipling, although a player himself, called golf ''a senile dementia''. Its perceived smugness jarred.

As for golf's frightful fashions, how would anyone with even a scintilla of self respect be seen in public wearing those dismal designs in disagreeable fabrics and colours, calculated only to confirm that if golf has any claim to style it could only be in a swing of rare elegance.

Golf has, it seems, even tamed that most laddish of personalities, Chris Evans, whose emergence from the closet is currently being recorded in a Channel 4 series. Mind you, it is not too difficult to revel in a game when you are privileged to play it against the backdrop of Pebble Beach. Never mind that a round on this great Californian course now apparently costs some $300, plus compulsory electric cart. The willingness of sports buffs to be separated from their money - be it by the price of strawberries at Wimbledon or a football club's

uniform - is a universally irrational phenomenon.

The sceptical approach to golf from quarters at best unsympathetic, at worst prejudiced has perhaps been best summed up for me by Craig Brown. No, not football's Craig Brown, but the journalist who combines humourous writing with restaurant reviews, in themselves not mutually exclusive pursuits. Not long ago Brown confessed to a friend that he had taken up golf. His decline into shabby gentility having been greeted with strident disbelief, Brown responded with a rather telling comment: ''Golf is an activity that greatly upsets those who do not play it.'' Long may their discomfort continue.