James Delingpole
content just to trundle as history’s also-rans.”
But not any more. At least not where Southgate’s (no relation, surely?) magnificent team of exciting, often untested young players are concerned. Southgate has done to England football what Margaret Thatcher did to the Conservative Party from the mid-1970s.
Gone is the policy of caution, familiar faces past their best and “managed decline”. It has been replaced by a buccaneering spirit of adventure, risktaking. “Yes, it’s still possible we’ll come unstuck,” is the message of England 2018. “But at least when we go down we’ll go down in flames, with a grin on our faces having fought a great fight.”
And a hugely entertaining fight too. Can you remember the last era when there was an England game where you didn’t have to watch through your sweaty fingers, writhing at every moment until, if we were lucky, we survived just long enough to go out on penalties? Well our 2018 boys finally laid along that particular ghost to rest when they eventually – and deservedly – beat Colombia.
Even when England aren’t involved I still find penalties almost too painful to watch. In fact they remind me an awful lot of the way Brexit is going. I’m thinking particularly of that moment when the player on your team has just missed a key penalty and all your hopes now rest on the player from the other side being just as incompetent, preferably missing the goal completely and rescuing your team by default.
Well that, until Monday, was exactly how I was viewing our Brexit negotiations. Team Theresa had basically conceded the opposition an almighty victory in the form of her Chequers missed penalty. Our only final slim hope of clawing back a win from the teeth of disaster would have been if the opposing Team EU’s leading player Michel Barnier had missed his penalty too. (That miss, in case it’s not obvious, would be if instead of agreeing to accept May’s abject, sell-out, UT then came David Davis’s resignation, followed by that of Boris Johnson – and for a brief moment I felt almost as optimistic about politics as I did about the football. They demonstrated qualities that our England players have in spades but in which, up till now, our Cabinet has been sorely lacking: patriotic duty and a sense of winning purpose.
Whatever you think of Brexit it was the most forceful expression of democratic will in British history. In June 2016, 17.4 million people – young and old, rich and poor, Left and Right, voted to leave the EU (not linger in some halfway house), and it is the Government’s job to honour that decision.
The obvious – indeed only – way to do this is by going into the Brexit negotiations determined to give Britain the strongest possible result, not approach it with the white flags already flying.
Most of Theresa’s Cabinet of Remainers seem keener to play for the EU opposition than they are for the home side.
Thank God none of them is in tonight’s team against Croatia.
‘A buccaneering spirit of adventure’