A long way down from the Boys of ’66 to the bad boys of Brexit

HAVING celebrated Big Jack’s contribution to one of the happiest periods in Irish history, we shouldn’t forget the uniqueness of the man in another respect — he also contributed to one of the happiest periods in English history.

I mean, we hadn’t forgotten it or anything, we all acknowledged that he was on the England team that won the World Cup in 1966 — and yet we probably never really got our heads around it, how one man could be so involved in some of the defining moments in the history of two countries.

Indeed if anything, it is England which should have been clearing the front pages last weekend, it is England which has lost some irreplaceable part of its soul — it is England which should have been remembering on a grand scale, one of its greatest cultural moments of the modern era.

It may seem like ancient times, but the very fact that Jack only died last weekend, that five of the Boys of ’66 are still around, reminds us that in the broader sweep of history, it was only the other day.

RTE was rightly showing Ross Whitaker’s two-part documentary The Boys In Green last Sunday night, and you might have expected some similar tribute from the BBC — perhaps The

Boys of ’66: England’s Last

Glory, the documentary narrated by Michael Parkinson in 1986, to mark the 20th anniversary of the tournament when Jack and his team-mates became “the most famous Englishmen on the planet”.

It was a lovely piece of work, which even starts with the voice of Jack himself, recalling that glorious day at Wembley — it moves on to describe what happened to all the players, to meet again Ray Wilson, who became an undertaker, or Roger Hunt, working in his family’s haulage firm.

And, of course, Parkinson himself was working well here, due to his deep understanding of the cultural significance of the triumph of these talented people at that time, and of other talented people from similar backgrounds such as, say, Michel Parkinson. Or Paul McCartney. Or Michael Caine.

Indeed such was the triumph of English culture, you could name an almost limitless number of brilliant footballers or musicians or actors who had emerged during the post-war period. A time in which the main thing that mattered was how good you were, not how well you were connected.

But due to the tragic developments of recent years, if you ask people the names that come to mind when they think about England, they probably won’t start with the Charltons or Bobby Moore or Michael Parkinson or

Paul McCartney or Michael Caine. Or even David Bowie or Gary Lineker or Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

No, it’ll be the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage and Jacob ReesMogg. It’ll be the Bullingdon Boys and the Brexiters.

Class conflict is at the root of a lot of things in this world, and there’s a strong undercurrent of it among the Old Etonians and their ilk who have been driving the clown car that is Brexit, driving it off the edge of the world — not that that matters to them, they will always be fine.

They have nominated the “liberal elite” as their enemy, without mentioning the ancient elite in which they themselves are ensconced — the traditional ruling class which has re-asserted itself against these impertinent Eurocrats and other bloody intellectuals.

The public schoolboys have, if you like, Taken Back

Control. And in so doing, they have demonstrated two main things — their own utter uselessness at anything except the most cynical self-advancement; and the strange fact that a lot of people still believe almost anything that is being said to them in a posh accent.

In fact another odd thing about Big Jack, is that for all his obvious achievements, if anything his abilities were understated.

Leaving aside the football, at which he had succeeded on a few levels, he had all sorts of arcane knowledge of the natural world, and he could present TV programmes on those subjects like, well, like a natural.

Here was a really gifted man, who was almost absurdly unassuming in the way that he carried those gifts — compare and contrast with the English cultural icon of 2020 that is Boris Johnson, an empty man so full of himself, spraying around his classical allusions like liquid manure.

Indeed last week a wondrous TV clip emerged of Jack at the Blitz club in 1980, wearing a tuxedo, completely relaxed among the New Romantics and other such exotics, unthreatened by their supposed strangeness.

Then again if that Parkinson documentary about the Boys of ’66 were to be shown again on British TV, it would almost be too shocking for audiences — they’d be looking at these men of genuine substance, exuding a quality that can only be described as decency; and then they’d remember that today, “the most famous Englishmen on the planet” don’t look like Bobby Moore, they look like Michael Gove.

They’d think it’s all over...

‘Just look at Boris Johnson, spraying around his classical allusions like liquid manure’