Her choice of inspirational figure suggests a willingness to curry favour with one audience by showing two fingers to anotherAt Conservative party hustings in Leeds six weeks ago, Liz Truss declared she wanted to “channel the spirit of Don Revie”. Which suggests she wasn’t entirely familiar with his experience of leading his country. Still, as she takes office amid dismal poll ratings, with a sceptical parliamentary party and an election looming in 2024, the new prime minister may just regard three years in the job, followed by a lucrative and widely reviled sinecure in the Middle East, as a pretty decent outcome.Of course, political coverage in this country has long been influenced by the confected drama and basic unseriousness of...
The government did not back England players when fans booed them for taking the knee and now face the consequencesSo, as the prime minister has learned, a week is a long time in football. He and Priti Patel began it grinning in their crisp new England shirts, seeking kudos for their politics from a triumph in Europe just months after they took Britain out of the EU. Instead, the racist abuse that rained on England’s young black players following defeat on penalties on Sunday meant Johnson and Patel were finally confronted with consequences of the green light they gave to racism before the tournament started.One senior football figure told me there was “deep outrage” in the game about Johnson and...
Glacial opener, failed captain, convicted assaulter – no wonder the former PM has idolised him since childhoodGeoffrey Boycott has always represented Theresa May’s idealised version of herself, and in that sense it is no surprise that the former prime minister has given him a knighthood in her resignation honours. She can see the hero where others can’t, and if only people could look past the social awkwardness, and the thinly disguised selfishness, and the various nasty businesses, then they would surely realise what heroic qualities truly are.Indeed, perhaps this knighthood foreshadows how someone who has herself exhibited these characteristics in her own career could go on to a highly successful second act in the political commentary box, or on the...
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s tweet was frustrating because we want sport to be pure, as it was at Lord’s in a game the Kiwis didn’t deserve to lose“I’m not sure anyone at the moment has a steady heart … Seven weeks of cricket, 48 games, one ball. Here’s Boult, they’re going to push, are we in for a super over? They’ve got to go quick, they’ve got to go quick. OUT! I’m sure he’s OUT! We’re going for a super over!”The ICC montage of the last moments of the Cricket World Cup final has almost four million views – which isn’t that impressive considering three million of them are mine. Ian Smith’s commentary, in that gravelly Kiwi drawl, is spine tingling to...
A threadbare attendance rather undermined parliament’s vote of no confidence in the FA, and the wait for more meaningful and radical change is likely to go onA vote by MPs in parliament of no confidence in the Football Association, the 154-year-old governing body of our hugely beloved national sport, ought to stand as a grand historical moment, a necessary response by politicians to calamitous failures. Sadly, the “ayes” which had it for the motion brought by Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, cannot realistically be said to have written themselves into text books.Leaving aside that Collins’s was a backbench motion with no legal force, considered an irritant by the sports minister, Tracey Crouch, who...