This late-flowering, politicized ethnogenesis among the English people is obviously the direct product of mass immigration, which has had the effect of rapidly diminishing the English population share within their own titular country. It was also obvious, and long-predicted, that the parallel growth and confidence of Scottish, Irish and Welsh nationalism would, in turn, midwife an English equivalent. When we add to this volatile mix the obsession, in recent decades, of Britain’s political and cultural class with aping essentialist American rhetoric on racial and ethnic difference, valorizing minority identities while actively seeking to suppress and undermine (or “dismantle” and “de-center”, if you prefer) majority ones, then we see the perfect Molotov cocktail our elites have managed to assemble for us in the coming decades.

Is Rishi Sunak English? The question is so poisonous because it elides multiple distinct but partly overlapping concepts — ethnicity, culture, political identity — and is further obscured by late 20th-century British taboos and anxieties over race. One can be culturally English (as, for good or ill, I am) without belonging to the English ethnic group (to which I do not, being of mixed Greek and Irish origin). Like my suburban Northwest London contemporary Suella Braverman, I have my own ethnic identities, which I have inherited and been socialized in, and do not wish to give up, instead passing them on to my children. This is not a question of race — both Greek and Irish are European ethnic groups — but of ethnicity. I do not feel aggrieved or despondent that I am not a member of the English ethnic group, just as I do not pine to be Japanese or Basque or Hutu. But framing the question, as parochial commentators seem compelled to, as “can non-white people be English?” has, whether through well-meaning ignorance or willful obtuseness, led to the absurd situation where the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, as well as a cultural identity, is either denied or actively suppressed as a barrier to racial harmony. Indeed, for New Labour apparatchik John McTernan — proud possessor of Irish identity and citizenship through descent — “the concept of ethnic English is truly evil”.

At the same time, elements of the online Right are indeed objectively racist, denying English ethnicity to people of part-English origin by virtue of their mixed race. One of their victims, the MP Ben Obese-Jecty, who is half-English and half-Ghanaian, is clearly more English than me, ethnically, because I am not at all English. Given that a significant proportion of the new ethnonationalist Right often do not have to look back far to find non-English ancestors, then a preference for people of European but non-English heritage over non-white people with some English descent clearly shows a focus on racial identity over ethnicity or ancestry — another conceptual matter entirely. If some level of physical descent from ancestors from England were the central factor, then the vast majority of the Caribbean, or even African-Americans, would have a greater claim on Englishness or Britishness than the non-ethnically English descendants of European immigrants, though I have never seen today’s genetic purists make this claim. The racial aspect, on both sides of this debate, then, overwhelmingly obscures the matter supposedly at hand, that of Englishness as an ethnic identity, which is to say the existence of the English as a people, distinct from the Welsh, or the Tibetans, or the Iroquois, or any other of the world’s ethnic groups which are universally agreed to exist.

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Perhaps the online debate revolves around whether prominent non-white personalities can be definitively called English precisely because the question feels more loaded, and thus more dangerous to comfortably discuss. The existence, or otherwise, of the English as an ethnic group has become, politically, a sub-problem of the continued viability of a tolerant multiracial society within the context of vastly expanded mass Third World immigration. Without the policy choices creating this situation, this entire conversation would not be happening, and these neurotic, increasingly casuistical debates would simply not be taking place. The progressive claim that the English, alone among human societies, do not exist as an ethnic group is so absurd as to be unworthy of discussion: it is simply a means of evading the question of what political importance should be attached to being of English ancestry in the very land named after their ethnic group. If the reasoning is that the path to racial harmony lies in removing the English, alone, from the long list of the world’s ethnic groups, against the will of those who both are and believe themselves to be such, then permit me the adopted English understatement of saying that the outcome will not be positive.

To disentangle, as our purposefully obtuse commentators choose not to, the distinct issues of race and ethnicity, it is more useful here not to ask whether Rishi Sunak is English, but whether Andy Burnham is. Proud of his Irish descent (on his father’s side Irish Protestant from Drogheda, so we must assume of English settler origin), Burnham has made it explicitly clear that of the various regional and national — even pan-continental — identities he holds, Englishness comes last. As Tom McTague observed in his profile interview with the Prime Minister, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity”, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”, an identity which “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth”. With his Derbyshire surname, vanishingly rare in Ireland, no one can reasonably doubt that should he have wished, Andy Burnham could have chosen to assimilate into an English political, cultural, or even ethnic identity. For the most part, it seems he has chosen not to. Politically, he is British (and incidentally is strikingly more Unionist in dealing with Sinn Féin than his recent predecessors). Culturally, his Englishness is regional, urban and Northwestern rather than national: it is perhaps more difficult to imagine him bedecking No. 10 North with England flags in support of the national team than Starmer chose for the British state’s previous London regional office. Ethnically, should he even think in these terms, we must assume it is his “Irish roots” that dominate.

Indeed, when hosting Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin at Makerfield’s Brian Boru club last week, Burnham observed that “I certainly am proud of the Irish heritage that I have in my family. And I was with the Prime Minister of Canada at the new Everton stadium this week… Another Irishman, it wasn’t unnoticed, a Mayo man, I think.” Carney certainly is, or was — he relinquished the Irish citizenship he held from the 1980s on becoming Canada’s Prime Minister — “another Irishman” and “a Mayo man”. On the official Irish Department of Foreign Affairs website, one can find the lovingly-produced document “Aughagower to Canada: A commemorative history of the Carney and Moran families”, a masterpiece of sentimental old country soft power, tracing Carney’s forebears back to their peasant smallholdings, published “on the auspicious occasion of your visit to your ancestral home”. Carney acquired his third, British citizenship through necessity, as is mandatory on becoming Governor of the Bank of England (there is of course no English citizenship to acquire for what is, despite its name, a British role). What makes Carney “another” Irishman to Burnham? Is it citizenship? He is no longer an Irish citizen. Culture? Perhaps, though it is difficult to see exactly how this manifests.

More obviously, the answer is in descent, and the very idea of having “an ancestral home” in the first place. Such descent is a category recognized by the Irish state, like the majority of European states, for citizenship purposes, in a way the British state does not recognize its own British, or even English diaspora, in America, Canada, Australia, or other distant outcrops of the great historic wave of British transcontinental migration. But there is, still, an element of personal choice here: though less Irish, by ancestry, than either Burnham or Carney, that descendant of stout Hampshire yeomen, Joe Biden, chose to identify as Irish, in a distinctively bombastic Irish-American way.

Comparing Irishness to Englishness, then, we see that ancestry is a factor in the Irish case; citizenship another factor (though neither Biden nor Burnham are or ever were Irish citizens); and choice — the subjective matter of personal identity construction, itself a product of socialization from within and without the cultural in-group — the third. It is not any one of these things in isolation, but an interplay of all of them. If British progressives, trying to suppress a politically toxic, and, it is not difficult to foresee, potentially tragic outcome that they have themselves created, now find themselves denying the very existence of the English as an ethnic group, it must be said that much of the newly ethnonationalist Right exists in a similar state of confusion about the subjective element of choice in ethnic affiliation. If ancestry alone were the operative factor, that son of a Birmingham stonemason, Patrick Pearse (who incidentally blamed his “cold nature” and social awkwardness on his “English blood”), would be only partly acceptable as Irish, yet you cannot find even the most extreme neo-Gaelic nationalist online claiming so. When the London-born Englishman John Stephens changed his name to Seán Mac Stíofáin and led the Provisional IRA at the start of the Troubles, it was surely a triumph of will over ancestry, and yet he was nevertheless accepted as Irish by the most zealous Irish nationalists then available. Admittedly, spearheading armed rebellions may be a stiff benchmark for successful assimilation, but the Irish case — so geographically close and culturally similar to England, compared with the vastness of the surrounding world, yet so utterly dissimilar nevertheless — remains, as always, a useful foil to English certainties.

No one, at least until Irish progressives belatedly acquired once-fashionable Anglo-American opinions, doubted the existence of the Irish as a people distinct from others in the world, or that the Irish people, as such, are distinct from the English. Even the latter claim is, at least, still vestigially held by the Irish progressive class as the last remnant of Irish nationalism. Indeed, hapless Ed Sheeran has recently, by virtue of his disinclination to publicly condemn Israel, been stripped of his inherited Irishness by prominent Irish progressives, and presumably condemned to mere Englishness for his sins. This element of politicized cultural negotiation, from within and without the in-group, is neither an English nor a Right-wing peculiarity but an inherent feature of ambiguous cases in what is, by its nature, a socially constructed category. Ancestry, ethnicity, political identity: these are partially overlapping but distinct concepts, for Englishness as well as Irishness.

Yet the fact that many Irish people can claim English ancestry, like Gerry Adams, or Scottish, like Mary Lou McDonald or Conor McGregor, does not negate the existence of an Irish ethnic group, which both partially overlaps with British populations in terms of descent, but is also held in jealous contradistinction as a matter of identity formation. Indeed it is in Northern Ireland, where Irish and British ancestry is most closely intertwined in most families, that the cultural boundaries between them are most rigidly enforced. As the anthropologist Fredrik Barth observed in his influential book Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, it is the very existence of cultural boundaries themselves rather than the “cultural stuff” they are commonly held to contain, that makes the distinction between ethnic groups. The ability of individuals, in very particular and mutually negotiated ways, to slip between them, rather than deconstructing ethnic groups, reifies them as culturally meaningful categories. Ancestry, real or fictive, is an element, even a large element, in the existence of ethnic groups, but the two terms do not overlap entirely. Both sides in this interminable debate are conflating related but distinct concepts, and poisoning a debate that will result in serious real-world consequences for millions of people.

So when Jacob Rees-Mogg can claim, to online outrage, that the English are a “mongrel people”, then this is something that can be said of every ethnic group on earth outside uncontacted Amazon tribes or Andaman Islanders, it is not particularly meaningful. Even Winston Churchill, in his popular work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, took great pleasure in ascribing different temperamental characteristics of the English “race”, the common late-Victorian usage for what we would today term “ethnicity”, to the various ancestral strains in its makeup. Churchill, who was half-American of English descent, certainly did not intend to deny the existence of an English ethnic group: indeed, his work was intended to explain what he predicted as its domination of the earth, or at least justify the handover of power he oversaw from its mother country to its New World successor empire. It is sadly ironic that the man who sacrificed the British empire to defeat Hitler spent a large part of his life writing a multi-volume epic glorifying his own ethnic group, from its island birthplace to its vast new lands across the globe, that would now itself be considered tantamount to Nazi race science by the standards of British politicians in 2026. What a muddle these people have found themselves in, and what a sad and needless predicament for the English themselves. These are nuanced and complex terms, hedged with ambiguities at the edges, but at the same time, you should not need a DPhil in Anthropology to know whether you exist.

Where does all of this leave us? The observable fact that membership of one ethnic group or another, is in certain circumstances, and within certain cultural contact zones, mutable or negotiable, is less politically relevant than the fact that for the majority population of England, such circumstances have not existed since the early Middle Ages. The English were, until relatively recently, disinclined to center themselves as an ethnic group at home precisely because they were one of the very first in the world to form a nation-state, in which this identity was unchallenged. Later, when other European societies were undergoing the wave of explicit identity-formation that led to modern nation-states, the English had happily subsumed themselves into an imperial British identity, which no longer exists — except perhaps vestigially in Whitehall. But, just as the modern experience of mass immigration leads to complex and ambiguous identities in the descendants of immigrants, whether inherited or consciously maintained like Burnham or Carney’s layers of Irishness, at its current scale, it has now caused the English to adopt the same introspective anxieties and acts of conscious identity formation.

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We may say that the creation of hyphenated English identities have suddenly transmuted unhyphenated Englishness from an assumed cultural norm into a politicized identity. English demographic decline in England itself, with all the rapidly eroding taboos around its open discussion, is the central fact driving all of this discourse, around which everything else is displacement activity. It is the direct result of mass immigration since the Nineties that these questions of identity and ancestry and meaning, the stereotypical immigrant neuroses, have now come to overshadow the English themselves, who in their homeland have no other identities to play with, or assume, or explore.

Like any child of immigrants, I have made choices, rational or romantic or some combination of the above, and for good or ill others have been made for me, or inherited. Like Mark Carney, I have “an ancestral home” in Ireland, and have chosen to “return” to it. If Jacob Rees-Mogg thrusts Englishness upon me, I must therefore politely decline. Yet for those whose ancestral home is England, there is no escaping the problem. Some have chosen self-assertion; others have chosen self-negation: but there can be no real imminent resolution when what was once unspoken and merely assumed has, for the first time in many centuries, become a matter of political dispute and negotiation. Yet it is doubtful that either current position, maximalist or minimalist, on who gets to call themselves English has yet reached its final form, but should instead be seen like the first haggling at a bazaar. There is, presumably, a middle-ground between claiming that the entire world is composed of temporarily embarrassed Englishmen, and determining belonging solely by 23andme results.

In Greece, which went through this process in the 19th century, despite the strong ideology of shared ethnic identity and physical descent from the ancient Greeks driving the modern state, some groups, like Romanian-speaking Vlachs or Albanian-speaking Orthodox Arvanites, were adopted as fictive Hellenes, while others found less happy outcomes. In Ireland, the descendants of English settlers were twice absorbed into the Irish ethnic group, as Catholics in the 17th century, and as Southern Protestants only definitively after independence (the assimilation of Ulster Protestants into Irishness is, we may say, a distinctly unfinished project). But modern English political ethnogenesis is only beginning, and it is impossible to predict its final form, should there ever be one. It is very plausible that an accepted compromise will retain more of imperial Britishness than the current discourse would imply. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness is also politically unstable, and one possible route out, or deferral, of English angst over identity could be a revivified unionism, which indeed appears to be Burnham’s response. But the stakes, for those of ambiguous Englishness, are increasingly high, as the once uncomplicated English begin to argue among themselves. We may as well get used to these endless and increasingly sterile online debates, and the shadow they threaten to cast over our offline lives. All of us, English or not, are now stuck with the English Question.

Roald Dahl found the genre fiendishly difficult: “I am a short story writer myself, and although I have been doing it for 45 years and have always longed to write just one decent ghost story, I have never succeeded in bringing it off.” Yet James produced a whole clutch of haunting yarns. Not all are strictly stories about ghosts. There are witches, sorcerers, revenant counts and devils aplenty. Many are true classics. In Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, a traveler buys an ancient volume and finds that his purchase comes with an unwelcome freebie; Casting the Runes sees a cursed man try to outwit a practitioner of black magic; The Mezzotint allows an academic to watch a grisly crime unfold before his eyes.

How did he do it? An excellent new biography by Darryl Jones, For the Dead Remember: A Life of M. R. James, sensibly avoids tackling that question directly. There isn’t much about James that you can tackle directly, apart from the bare bones of his career. Born in 1862; prep school; Eton; King’s College, Cambridge (student, don, provost, vice chancellor); Eton again (provost); died in 1936.

He was a phenomenally hard worker, often publishing several books a year. James spent most of his life consumed by Biblical apocrypha and the cataloging of manuscripts. On the side, he became a noted authority on medieval stained glass and the occult. He enjoyed Charles Dickens and bicycling holidays in France. Politically, he was conservative, and deeply suspicious of change. Friendship was his chief pleasure. Colleagues at King’s wondered how he was able to sustain such a pitch of scholarly industry while hosting convivial gatherings in his rooms almost every evening. There was no romance. James was attracted to men, or at least loved them, but that’s as far as it went. As Jones writes, “If he had an inner life at all (and I have sometimes wondered), it stayed resolutely inner.”

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Inner lives are all very well, though they are rarely of interest to a stranger. It is the work that matters, and James’s stories still tick today. The world, always weird, is getting weirder. Familiar shapes dissolve, lights flicker, your cup isn’t quite where you set it down. Millionaires are pumping themselves full of their own children’s blood, vulnerable adults are falling in love with computer programs and drinkers are queueing in pubs. The life James knew is definitively gone, remote as Elmet, but that doesn’t matter to the stories. James’s strength lay in his ability to articulate weirdness and, occasionally, give a sense of how it might be weathered.

You don’t have to be conservative to write good ghost stories, but it probably helps. Most supernatural tales are about what happens when a debt goes unpaid, or a life is taken, or an ancient boundary marker moved. So much supernatural fiction hinges on an awareness of how fragile our little world of custom and convention really is. James was certainly a man of conservative instincts. As his choice of academic specialism suggests, he disliked abstraction, preferring the solid realities of manuscripts to grand theorizing. He was part of the 1897 campaign that prevented women from taking degrees at Cambridge, though it is only fair to note that his stance on that issue was not an unusual one for the time. Even his approach to stained glass was marked by a suspicion of change: he hated the thought of restoration; once a thing was gone, it was gone forever, and there was no point pretending otherwise. Jones observes that “the ghost story is a characteristic product of nineteenth-century forces. It is a reaction to the secular, materialist, industrial modernity that animated the dominant, progressivist Victorian utilitarian ideology.” It was the natural genre for a man like James.

Some biographers have a tendency to patronize their subjects, to strain a writer’s work through the DSM 5 and see what sticks. Jones is too good to fall for this guff, simply observing that James’s tales return to similar themes again and again. A horror of hair — luxuriant, invasive — is one such motif. Bedrooms are dangerous places, as are antiquarian booksellers and libraries. Curtains, bedsheets and other household objects are usually worth a second glance, just to be sure that they aren’t something more. But James’ great theme is that of curiosity punished.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad” is perhaps his most famous story, in part due to the extraordinary 1968 television adaptation, which ranks among the best dramas the BBC has ever made. It goes like this. A Cambridge don travels to East Anglia for a golfing holiday. Naturally, he can’t stick to golf. Some amateur excavation in a ruined preceptory uncovers an ancient whistle engraved with Latin text. He takes it back to his hotel. Late that night, with supper over and the bedroom quiet about him, he picks the whistle up and blows.

That’s enough plot. Anyone unfamiliar with the story should discover the rest for themselves. Suffice to say that “Oh, Whistle…” deals with many of James’s deepest preoccupations. The don, disdainful of anything that smacks of the supernatural, is saved by another hotel guest, a retired colonel whose muscular Anglicanism and intellectual humility prove much more valuable than any amount of book-learnt skepticism. England’s countryside — Jones notes that James has been unfairly overlooked as a landscape writer — is alive and old. At one moment, the world is reduced to bands of black and grey, a cell of groynes and shingle and graphite sea. Above all, there is the warning to the curious. Do not interfere with things that you cannot understand. They are more than capable of interfering with you in turn.

It isn’t all doom and groyne. James blended the truly unnerving with moments of coziness and comedy. This is because most of his stories were not written for magazines. They were performance pieces, delivered at Christmastime to an audience in his rooms at King’s. Wry asides about donnish peccadillos were designed to elicit chuckles of recognition. James had a reputation as a mimic, and so most of his tales include a Worthy Cockney or Knowing Rustic, their over-long contributions a vehicle for the author’s talents. While James is worth reading and rereading, I sometimes wonder if it isn’t better to listen to his work instead. After all, these stories were meant to be heard, not read. How strange that a writer so mistrustful of innovation should prove such a natural fit for the audiobook.

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James doesn’t seem to have taken his ghost stories particularly seriously. They were an amusement, both to write and to perform. His main work was scholarly. Later, he found himself vice chancellor of Cambridge during the Great War, and was consumed by the construction of temporary hospitals and the settling of Belgian refugees. Perhaps this is part of his tales’ enduring appeal. They were not labored over. While Dahl struggled his whole life to write just one decent ghost story, James would appear before his audience with ink still wet on the page. When a story didn’t come off, he simply abandoned it and moved on to the next.

In 1931, James was asked to write a preface for his Collected Ghost Stories. The task clearly irritated him: “In accordance with a fashion which has recently become common, I am issuing my four volumes of ghost stories under one cover…” Today’s fashion is to state why an author is worth reading now. It is no longer sufficient to say, “because they are a very good writer.” For reasons that do not seem clear to anyone in the publishing industry, an argument must be made for tongue-blistering relevance. This is how we end up with front covers claiming that a particular subspecies of mollusc “Made the Modern World”.

Thankfully, Jones has been allowed to write a very good book about a very interesting man. M. R. James, you will be relieved to hear, did not Make the Modern World. In fact, he did everything he could within his small sphere to keep it at bay. His relevance is linked purely to a chain of excellent supernatural yarns that have entertained and chilled readers for over a century. He influenced many other writers of the uncanny too, from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson to Susan Hill. Yet I happen to think that his tales still are worth reading now. Because they are very good, yes, but also because they are weird stories for weird times. They ask sensible questions. Does that mound need to be dug up? That whistle blown? There’s some excellent advice for daily life in there, too: “Be careful how you handle the packet you pick up in the carriage-drive, particularly if it contains nail-parings and hair. Do not, in any case, bring it into the house. It may not be alone…”

It was produced by the Sheffield independent company, Warp Films, and shot in and around Wakefield. Owen Cooper, the young actor at the center of the story, spoke in his native Warrington accent; his father, played by Stephen Graham, was obviously from Liverpool; only the police investigating the case appeared to be Southern. Well, that’s not so unusual, people do move around the country. Only, nowhere in the script does anyone mention where they are from at all. There’s a sign reading Doncaster Social Services visible at one point, but it seems a bit accidental. This is in contrast to the rootedness of other Warp productions, such as This Is England (set very specifically in the Meadows Estate, Nottingham), or Dead Man’s Shoes (Matlock, Derbyshire). 

Well, so what? The point is, this could be any school, any bedroom, any child, perhaps any country too. Only, placelessness is a persistent stylistic choice in Neflix dramas, perhaps their most distinctive feature. Adolescence is set in Netflixland, a borderless zone where the vibe may change but the high-key, low-contrast lighting does not. Just as the streaming platforms have collapsed time, with one episode melting into another in an infinite stream, so, too, have they collapsed space. 

A more aspirational Netflixland is showcased in the comedy Sex Education, starring Gillian Anderson as a glamorous sex therapist, shot around the Wye Valley — only its sweeping river views, stunning architectural homes, and American high school evoke Californian as opposed to Welsh levels of affluence; more Santa Cruz-on-Wye than anywhere that actually exists. Similarly, Netflix’s many Harlan Coben adaptations take place in aspirational mid-Atlantic suburbs that seem part-Cheshire, part-Connecticut; the show home Rowan Atkinson destroys in the slapstick Man vs. Bee appears to be located in a screensaver. When England does get to be England, it is an England designed for the American gaze: the unLondon of the sinisterly unfunny genderswap comedy Ladies First; the ludicrous luxury five-story castle that supplants the crap Haywards Heath retirement home in the adaptation of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. 

As we know, Americans are terrified of Europe — and so it must be made safe, affluent, legible. Where real locations are essential to a story they become vibes, keywords, placeslop, exaggerated versions of themselves: see the macaron Paris of Emily in Paris, the tourist fantasy of My Oxford Year or the InstaSicily of The Leopard. “Plenty of aesthetics but the algorithmic soul (l’anima algoritmica) is obvious,” complained one Italian writer. It’s a glimpse of what the world might look like under a Zuckerberg dictatorship.

Do audiences mind this cultural erasure? Seemingly not, to judge from the Ofcom figures — though it is worth stressing that just about every single British TV show audiences have ever held to their hearts has been as much about place as character. The Peckham of Only Fools and Horses, the Calderdale of Happy Valley, the Derry of Derry Girls, the Oxford of Inspector Morse, the Slough of The Office — these may not be scrupulously realist, but they are all depicted with care and attention by people who clearly know them. 

Indeed, arguably the most popular British sitcom of the last 20 years is based on the cross-cultural misunderstandings between a family from Billericay, Essex (population: 34,000) and a family from Barry Island, Glamorgan (population: 56,000). It’s almost impossible to imagine a Netflix commissioner greenlighting Gavin & Stacey today — and yet, this was precisely the kind of hyper-regionalism BBC3 commissioners were after in the mid-2000s. Everyone is, after all, from somewhere. Great television tells us where we are. Netflix tells us we’re nowhere in particular.

It seems quite strange in this regard that the loudest self-proclaimed defenders of British identity and culture also tend to be the ones most intent on eliminating the BBC and Channel 4 as supposed disseminators of liberal wokeness. In fact, British public broadcasters have traditionally (and constitutionally) gone to great pains to reflect Britain’s many different cultures. I’ve never been convinced by David Goodhart’s “Somewheres vs Anywheres” thesis, partly as I’m yet to see any evidence that educated liberal people are any less attached to their regional or national identities than poorer conservative people (try telling that to Andy Burnham). But there is a version of the distinction that carries weight here — between institutions rooted in place, and in the dull, homogenizing forces of international capital for which these places are simply colonies to dominate. For all their flaws, Britain’s public broadcasters are committed to an idea of Britain as a place of many overlapping communities; a program like Derry Girls required someone to give a damn about what it’s like growing up in Northern Ireland. Netflix, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc see Britain as a market, no more, no less; corporations fundamentally don’t care what their customers’ values are as long as they’re still pressing the relevant buttons to make someone somewhere some money.

Still, the streamer’s dominance is shakier than it appears. Netflix’s share price has fallen 41% over the last 12 months; in mid-July, it experienced a drop so vertiginous that earlier this month, it pulled down the entire NASDAQ. The company has meanwhile declined to release its latest viewer figures, and expensive new shows are flopping. For what it’s worth, I would have deleted my account long ago were it not bundled up with my broadband — as it is for most customers on Virgin, EE, BT or Sky. In other words, most of us aren’t actively choosing Netflix any more than we’re choosing Costa when it’s the only option in a motorway service station.

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What does seem strange is that Netflix retained its reputation as a home of “prestige TV” for quite so long. In its heady early days, when it was transitioning from a mail-order DVD business into a streaming service, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings could convincingly position the company as the natural home for ambitious, prestige dramas in the vein of The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Mad Men — all of which, incidentally, had very strong associations with particular places; and none of which were made by Netflix.

This was the era when literary figures like Zadie Smith were exhorting fellow novelists to study the brilliant plots of Game of Thrones and Hollywood heavyweights such as David Fincher were declaring that the best writing was “happening in television”. In the early 2010s, Netflix commissioners had enough VC cash to throw at weird new projects to see what worked — and it really did produce some gems. BoJack Horseman is perhaps the definitive drama about modern Los Angeles, despite being a cartoon about a depressed horse. But this was before algorithmic programming took over: a tech-driven obsession with metrics, and a determined pursuit of the global average viewer. The contrast with the television Netflix once aspired to emulate is stark. “Fuck the average viewer” was David Simon’s guiding philosophy when he was creating The Wire — a series that obsessively, lovingly, angrily detailed the social and political intricacies of one medium-sized American city. 

Indeed, the enshittification of Netflix has been widely discussed within the TV industry for years, though enough people get paid handsomely to produce glossy nonsense that they don’t discuss it too loudly. The writer Naomi Alderman recently complained on Substack that all artistic decisions are now taken by tech people with “too much money and not enough taste”. The taste side of that is clearly a problem; there is no innate feel for which projects and which talent might be worth pursuing. But the “too much money” side is almost as bad, since streaming executives are shielded from the consequences of their terrible decisions — like, say, giving $40 million to Harry and Meghan — in the way that a BBC or Channel 4 commissioner never would be. 

The scale of the investment means that, sure, there are still occasionally breakout Netflix hits, usually emanating from some peripheral part of the empire. I’ve heard good things about the Zulu-language South African drama The Polygamist. And there was Adolescence, produced by talent nurtured within the British ecosystem. But then again Adolescence felt refreshing mostly because it was the kind of hard-hitting social-issues drama that the BBC and Channel 4 used to make all the time, with lower production values, for sure, but also a much deeper commitment to reflecting the country back to itself.

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The difference now is that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are no longer able to commission shows in the way they once were. The influx of US streaming giants has pushed up production costs and increasingly prices publicly funded broadcasters out of the market. Meanwhile the BBC has degraded its own offerings in an attempt to compete — CBBC, once a repository of high-quality, imaginative children’s programs, is increasingly full of brainrot. 

Personally, I barely watch TV anymore; Succession (made by HBO) was maybe the last program worth getting excited about. This is clearly a product of my age and eccentricity; but “engagement bleed”, as the streamers term it, is clearly causing panic in the boardrooms. According to Ofcom, young adults watched 11 minutes less on-demand TV last year, abandoning such challenging fare as Netflix’s Worst Roommate Ever for TikTok, Reels, YouTube and Twitch. Disney+ recently signed a content-sharing deal with TikTok in order to weather this transition. Netflix has experimented with adding short-form videos to the site and we can expect more such “snackable content” — a full picky bits picnic of slop. 

The inevitable direction of travel for such algorithmic content is not the broad expanses of the nation or the region or even the family but the narrow impulses of the individual. Netflix’s other distinctive technical innovation, besides binge-watching, was introducing individual user profiles for different family members — thus reinforcing the idea that watching TV was something each person does alone. Four family members watching four Netflixes on four individual screens naturally looks better, metrics-wise, than one family watching one screen. The stripping out of any sense of the communal from the home entertainment experience begins to look less like an omission and more like a strategy. It might be good for the stats; but it makes Netflixland a lonely place. An airless shopping mall full of slightly unconvincing luxury dupes; a run of generic fast-food joints in a joyless stadium; a gleaming campus where you can’t quite place anyone’s accent and the trees are all waxy green. Still, there are at least traces of the old civilization around, if you know where to search.

My 12-year-old and I recently discovered Daisy May Cooper’s extremely funny This Country, commissioned for BBC3 in 2017 but which I somehow missed at the time. It’s about a couple of teenagers in a second-rate Cotswolds village near Swindon — but it’s a place familiar to anyone who grew up anywhere slightly crap, which is basically everyone. My son, weaned on Japanese manga and American sitcoms, seems faintly amazed that TV shows can actually be so culturally specific — and might actually have something to say about the places he and his mates come from. But it’s the communal experience of watching it together, sharing the narrative, developing lore around hyper-specific references, that both of us like most. What happens, I wonder, when Netflixland is all we know?

I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness.

Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of England is tinder-dry. In windy, flammable coastal conditions, all it took was one spark — a glint through broken glass, a careless cigarette, or abandoned barbecue.

The Dunwich fire, though now hemmed in by local fire crews, consumed 150 hectares of heath and woodland, forcing the evacuation of local villages, holiday parks, and other establishments. Conservationists are calling it a disaster from which local ecologies will take 25 years to recover. Oh, my England! But perhaps this can stand as a reminder that even this green and pleasant land, so long inhabited and so deeply over-written and sculpted by successive histories and people, still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force. Its own spirits, not displaced by industrialization at all, that answer to none of us, but only themselves.

If you’ve encountered one of England’s thin places, you’ll know what I’m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk’s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region’s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.

Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud — but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into the seafaring English psyche, and the same people’s island-dwelling love of home.

Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer’s fire most of it was already lost.

During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.

A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river that was the town’s raison d’être moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.

Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like “Dunwich Dynamo” bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the “Dun Run”.

The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.

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We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they’re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn’t just mad London cyclists. It’s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.

A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I’ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland — and here, too, many report strange happenings: weird lights bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious Hobby Lanterns or jack-o’-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.

Since that first visit I’ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer’s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.

This is a part of England that’s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but by the sea itself.

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All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they’ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We’ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction by the landscape itself all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we’ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.

Even contemporary responses to climate change don’t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.

What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff, but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.

I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still deeper England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we — and whoever comes after us — are gone.

However mild and generous that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch — and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.

It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwritten rule of camping that you don’t pitch your tent right next to someone else’s unless you absolutely have to.) People say hello, but socializing is optional. Everyone’s kids play together, only vaguely supervised. The dogs are generally well-behaved. And, importantly, it’s high-trust by definition: after all, you can’t really lock a tent. 

In the absence of any phone signal for doomscrolling, I took for holiday reading a forthcoming book on English pastoral. In Fields of Green traces this literary trope of ideal rural landscapes as a response to the development of modern England. Its author, André Gushurst-Moore, argues that England has always needed “pastoral” as a literary mode where we can take refuge from upheaval, technology, and social fracture in the temporary Arcadia of England’s rolling green hinterlands. 

That’s certainly how it felt to take a holiday in a grassy field, without handheld access to the relentless rage and demoralization fodder online. The feeling of implicit trust in the campsite was also as restful as the lack of phone reception. But this year, I found my peace troubled by a nagging fear that environments of this kind might be, in some fundamental way, under threat.

From my tent you couldn’t drive far without passing signs for the nearby town of Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe’s constituency and heart of the Restore Britain movement: the epicenter of an angry, anxious sense to the effect that Britain used to be a high-trust country but isn’t any more. That is: Britain in general used to be more like my East Anglian campsite, but is growing increasingly hostile, fractious, and genuinely dangerous. 

Restore output typically blames this phenomenon on immigration. And it’s true that there is evidence linking illegal migration in particular both with other kinds of criminal activity, as well as the sort of friction that arises when incompatible social norms come suddenly into collision. But is the sense of decaying cohesion really just the fault of foreigners? Were we really always a “high-trust” society, until those immigrants came along and ruined it? I’m not sure we were. Rather, that sense of comparative national unity marked both the culmination, and end, of “Great Britain” in her imperial pomp. 

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If, in Gushurst-Moore’s telling, pastoral has always served as idealized respite from a more turbulent real-world England, that grittier England is also to be found in literary history. In prewar literature in particular, this England comes across as a vigorous, exciting, but not particularly “high-trust” place. Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders recounts the first-person narrative of a career criminal. Dickens’s 1839 Oliver Twist is set almost entirely in London’s criminal underworld. Plenty of other literary works detail the rampant fraud, theft, violence, and criminality of early modern and Georgian Britain. It was, in fact, predominantly the Victorians who set the nation on a path toward the centralization, order, and robust public mores that would eventually produce the “high-trust” Britain, that now feels as though it persists only in rural hinterlands and middle-class enclaves. 

As certain of their own correctness in every respect as they were dedicated to large-scale infrastructure, technological innovation, improving the morals of the poor, and expanding British dominion to every corner of the earth, the Victorians established the road patrols that ended the highway robbery of the Moll Flanders era. They also founded the police force that tackled the pervasive criminality of Oliver Twist’s London. And they built the factories and schools that, for better or worse, drilled generations of working-class Britons into regimented assembly-line work punctuated by shift-end bells. 

The English pastoral dream grew more intense, and was more desperately clung to, as real-life Great Britain industrialized, stripping coal-fields, belching smoke into the sky, and unrolling canals, railways, and roads across the landscape. Evocations of deep England such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) were, in this sense, a product of their own antithesis in the cities and suburbs — where, by the time Kenneth Grahame wrote it, most British people lived. 

The historian AJP Taylor observed, in his Oxford History of England, that “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. But that fateful August, just six years after The Wind in the Willows was published, the world of order, industry, and moral purpose the Victorians built came to its climax, and also the beginning of its end. 

When war broke out in 1914 every facet of Victorian innovation — the factories, the administration, the large-scale coordination of workforces, the patriotism — came together in a whole-of-society war effort. The English novelist Mary Augusta Ward described this phenomenon in 1916: an enormous, coordinated mobilization that reached into every corner of English society and geography, and re-oriented every part of it to supporting the same cause. 

After 1918, that regulatory Leviathan never really went away again. With the Second World War it expanded still further, adding blackout rules, rations, the mass evacuation of children from city centers, and a host of other emergency measures. By and large, everyone pulled together, under the organizing moral focus of existential threat. Those wartime habits, and the cultures they produced, persisted well into the long 20th-century peace that followed, legitimating the establishment of a nationwide welfare state, National Health Service, and much else we now take for granted. 

This is why we’re still obsessed with the wars: they really did create modern Britain. Wartime Britain also represented the pinnacle of that “high-trust” culture whose disappearance is now routinely blamed on immigration. But the Victorians, who turned a relatively lawless Moll Flanders Britain into that orderly, industrial empire of our recent past, understood something we’ve chosen to forget in the decades since: that order always implies a measure of violence. 

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists  and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railroads through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”. 

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilization, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

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By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behavior in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licenses to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state. 

But the decay in our capacity to enforce even the rules we have is as much, or more, a cause of immigration as its effect. And, pace Restore Britain, plenty of the rule-flouting is home-grown. Just recently, for example, the BBC reported on a huge rise in hare coursing, a deeply medieval-sounding illegal bloodsport, in which participants coordinate online to mass-trespass onto farmland and gamble on sight-hounds chasing hares across open fields. Such events are reportedly often linked to wider criminal gang activity; but there’s nothing to suggest the gangs themselves are anything but British. They just aren’t doing the postwar “high-trust” thing. 

Fifty dead hares dumped outside your country shop hardly evokes Arcadia. Nor, as the secessionist villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire recently realized, does the prospect of having your community of 400 imminently outnumbered three-to-one by 1,250 male asylum seekers at a nearby military base. 

It’s understandable that, after the two wars, no one wanted ever to live through anything so horrible again. The result was a desire both to preserve Britain’s war-forged social cohesion, and also to reject every trace of the toughness, and willingness to follow through with violence, that many blamed for the catastrophe of war. There followed some halcyon decades of peace with very little violence — but those decades are now, palpably, at an end.  

And yet the mistake wasn’t to dream of Arcadia as such. It was imagining (as Elon Musk still apparently does) that all of England could be preserved in a state of bucolic green. That’s never what these islands have been. The best we ever managed was preserving some pastoral space amid the upheaval. 

In the aftermath of our decades-long holiday from enforcing the rules, it’s going to take more than just being nice to strangers while camping to sustain this — or the postwar utopia of rules. We also need the piratical adventurousness of the Moll Flanders era, and the ambition, toughness, and self-belief of the Victorian one. Perhaps even, if we haven’t the space to jail criminals, we should do as they did. (It would be popular.) 

The price of some pastoral idyll is accepting that every such peaceful community has an edge. In the 21st century, you can’t hide from the internet forever — even, as those poor hares found out, in the countryside. And especially in the internet age, no space of “high trust” will stay that way for long, unless we stand ready to defend it. 

I was six the first and only time my father took me to Wembley. It was 1966, and we went to watch England play Argentina in a bad-tempered, goalless quarter-final that passed into legend when the Argentine captain, Antonio Rattín, was sent off, and refused for a small eternity to leave the pitch. He clearly wasn’t a gentleman. Twenty years later, in Mexico, Diego Maradona knocked England out with two goals, one of them scored with his hand. “It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team,” he said afterwards; the Falklands War was four years gone, and “we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.” Football, as someone ought to have said before me, is the continuation of war by other means.

This is the uncomfortable thing the World Cup keeps trying to tell us about ourselves. The tournament is the largest recurring ritual of group identity our disenchanted species still performs, and what it reveals is that the group has two faces.

Consider first the good one. When Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to describe how a mere collection of separate individuals becomes something more, he reached, of all improbable things, for football. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he distinguishes the series — the inert bus queue, each of us alone together, a plurality of solitudes — from what he calls the group-in-fusion, in which separate people dissolve into a single acting body bent on a common object. A good team is exactly this: 11 private ambitions subordinated to, and elevated by, a shape that none of them possesses alone. And so is a crowd. What happens in a stadium when your side scores is that a series of strangers becomes, for a few delirious seconds, a group.

Émile Durkheim gave this its name a century ago: collective effervescence, the heat that runs through a gathered crowd until it boils over and lifts each person clean out of himself. His scandalous conclusion was that this, and not any doctrine, is the origin of the sacred. The god, on this account, is the fever of the group. I have felt the fever, and not only at Anfield. I once watched Liverpool beat Bayern in Munich from a Scottish pub in the northern suburbs of Athens, among the Pan-Hellenic Liverpool supporters’ club, and found myself, against every instinct of my nature, high-fiving strangers whose language I do not speak (I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a hugger). For those 90 minutes everything was, briefly, right with the world.

The anthropology here inverts what we tend to assume. We imagine that a community exists first and then expresses its readymade unity in a shared rite. It is the other way about: the rite makes the community. “If one must act as though one believed,” wrote the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “one ends in believing… as one acts.” First you buy the shirt, sing the song, take the same seat; the belonging arrives afterwards, as a gift of the doing. This is why a nation you were merely assigned at birth can be felt, across 90 minutes, as the most intimate thing about you — and why a nation not your own can be borrowed wholesale. 

My first experience of passionate national feeling was for Brazil, in 1970; aged 10, in a full yellow kit, I rolled the names — Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão, Gerson — silently around my mouth like an incantation. Identity, the World Cup teaches, is not a possession but a performance, and a fluid one — fluid to the point of vertigo. At the 2006 tournament, I watched Serbia and Montenegro play on as a nation that had, a few weeks earlier, ceased to exist, singing the anthem of a Yugoslavia that had ceased to exist before it, and losing 6–0 to Argentina for good measure. My hosts in Belgrade were delighted, rather than crushed: here was a theater not of identity but of its endless differentiation — family, city, tribe, nation — against the forces of fate.

But here is the turn. The very warmth that binds the group is also what curdles into its opposite. Durkheim knew it, and so does anyone who has stood on a terrace. The same effervescence that produces the embrace produces the howl; the fever that makes the choir makes the mob. The going-out of the self is as available to the lynch party as to the congregation. I have heard grown men make jokes about the 97 dead of Hillsborough and the dead of Munich; I have wondered how much of the particular venom aimed at Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian and a Muslim, belongs to this darker order. Years ago, watching England go out of another tournament, I wrote of the “stupid, bloody-minded white tribalism that surrounds the England team, even when most of the best players are black”. That the phrase still fits, 12 years on, is itself the lesson. The fused group needs an enemy against which to fuse, and the World Cup, by dressing the tribe up as a nation and handing each one a flag, obligingly supplies one every four years, with fireworks.

This is not an argument against the tribe. It is an argument for the rule. Every tradition that has taken ecstasy seriously — every mystery cult, every church — has hedged it with ritual, an appointed time and place, a law. The rule is not the enemy of the rapture; it is what keeps the rapture from becoming a fire. Football’s genius, when it works, is to be at once the most tribal and the most rule-bound thing we do: a bounded 90 minutes, 17 laws, a marked and consecrated pitch, within which the fiercest collective passion is licensed precisely because it is contained. Off the terrace, I can loathe Manchester United and still, over a pint, hear out a United supporter’s reasons and grant that they are good ones. The small miracle of football talk is that it holds tribal loyalty and reasoned respect for the enemy in the same hand. If only our politics could manage the trick.

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It was Bill Shankly — a socialist who thought the game came down to “everyone working for each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day” — who liked to remind us that the true name of the sport is association football. That is the whole of it. Despite the ongoing horror show that is FIFA, the World Cup is the greatest festival of association we have left, and association is double through and through: the free society of equals and the baying pack are grown from a single root, and the only thing that decides which we get on the night is the rule we agree to keep.

And so, once again, I kept my seat and my superstitions, and gave myself over to the thing that is, as Shankly did not quite say, a good deal more important than life and death. For 55 minutes I even dared to believe: Anthony Gordon put England ahead, and in the treacherous minutes that followed I permitted myself a small vision of the final. I should have known better. I did know better. In the 85th minute, Enzo Fernández rose unmarked to shoot in a cross from Messi; in stoppage time, Lautaro Martínez scored with a header, from precisely the same source. One–two, and it was finished. Two goals, two crosses, both floated in by the little magician who is Maradona’s true heir — though this time, mercifully, he used no hand at all, only his feet, which somehow makes it worse. A decade ago, in the same doomed spirit, I wrote of the “headless chicken panic” that grips England the moment an opponent “dares to cross it into the penalty box”. It is a bleak little consolation to be proved right twice in seven minutes.

But it is never the losing that undoes you. England have a long and distinguished record of contriving to lose to Argentina in the end, and there is a certain grim solidarity to be had in it — the solidarity of the funeral. As Prometheus tells the chorus, chained to his rock, the one gift he gave to mortals was to stop them foreseeing their doom: “I sowed in them blind hopes.” That is the 90-minute anxiety dream — you are trapped, you can see exactly what is coming, and it comes anyway — and it is the tournament’s last and best revelation about the tribe. What binds us is not the certainty of glory but the blind, renewable, faintly ridiculous hope we hold in common: the hope that kills you, and that you would not, for all the world, be without. Spain will play Argentina on Sunday. I shall watch with the serenity of the neutral, which is to say with none at all. There is always 2030.

But victory for the Albiceleste is unlikely to alter the light in which the Argentine team has come to be seen internationally in this edition of the cup — one so different from that of four years ago in Qatar. Then, the Argentines’ pluck, and their star Messi, were easy to love as they wended their way to a third world championship, a journey that ended in a thrilling final against Mbappé’s France. The country was suffering from runaway inflation and seemingly without direction under its hapless Peronist president Alberto Fernández. Argentina deserved a win, it seemed, and its team earned one.

Now, New York magazine dubs Argentina the “surprise villains” of this Cup, while The New York Times reports on how other nations hope they’ll lose. What changed? Under Javier Milei’s new management, Argentines still suffer plenty: both economically, as the effects of Milei’s shock therapy sink in, and in football, where experiencing the trials and tribulations of the national squad is a kind of civic religion. “One must suffer”, fans like to say. “Without suffering, it’s not worth it”.

With the great exception of Messi, Argentina offers little inspiration in the way of tactics or technique. But the grit of its players and fans is boundless and enviable, and as debate spreads over whether Argentina’s neighbor Brazil owes its recent footballing retreat to evangelical Protestantism’s advances, perhaps this secularized Catholic cult — the Stations of the Cross reimagined as knockout-round progression — is helping power Argentine prowess in an age when South American football struggles to compete with the money and training of the European juggernauts.

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But this gospel of suffering is mostly for domestic consumption. Abroad, perceptions of Argentina follow its association, under Milei, with Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel. Latin Americans have long chafed at some Argentines’ superior touting — neither really accurate nor welcome in principle — of their society’s European character. But the current political moment has drawn wider attention to certain darker elements in the national culture.

Back in 2022, in the woke era’s waning years, it was possible to sympathize when, after a Washington Post op-ed asked why Argentina’s national squad lacked black players, the Twitter account of Milei’s party — at the time boasting only three lawmakers — dryly responded: “Because we are a country, not a Disney movie”.

Today, posts like this appear in a more sinister aspect, as another World Cup brings out the worst in Milei’s movement, now in power. “It’s such a drag to be black these days”, top Milei aide Santiago Caputo posted after Brazil lost to Norway, drawing an ugly line under a longstanding racial animosity in some quarters toward Argentina’s northern neighbor, with its large population of African descent.

Just as Argentina’s sclerotic state comes close to resembling the caricature that libertarians elsewhere falsely imagine government to represent, a deep (if far from universal) streak of anti-black racism pervades Argentine society. It creeps into everyday language: negro de mierda (“shitty black person”) is a common term of abuse, directed at people of all races, while quilombo, a colony of runaway slaves, some of which still exist today in Brazil, is a ubiquitous term for chaos and disorder.

A World Cup whose European squads count many non-white players, symbols of the migration of recent decades, has provided further grist for the mill. For an Argentine streaming channel aligned with Milei’s movement, “population replacement” explains Germany’s footballing decline; a provincial official belonging to his party calls France “the African team”. Milei himself recently declared that Europe’s migration policies had brought it “to the brink of extermination”. It’s an irony that a country forged, like all societies in the New World, by the collision of different peoples — indigenous, Spanish, Italian, Lebanese, Jewish, to name a few — could be held up as “conservative” on questions of immigration and national homogeneity against Europe, erstwhile land of the ethnostate.

But if Argentina’s turn to the Right has colored the way the rest of the world sees the team, it has done nothing whatsoever to puncture the love that Argentines, whatever their politics, cherish for their squad. What explains that? After all, other countries in Latin America, where the Right has lately won power, have seen political polarization tear into support for the national team. Many Left-leaning Brazilians are only now returning to old habits of wearing the jerseys and waving the flag, after Jair Bolsonaro’s movement made the yellow-and-green shirt a Right-wing uniform for the better part of a decade.

This year, the same phenomenon arrived in Colombia, when Abelardo de la Espriella — now the country’s president-elect — used the national jersey at his rallies. Espriella’s socialist rival accused him of appropriating a symbol that belonged to the nation at large, and a judge banned him from wearing the shirt, though that didn’t stop him from winning Colombia’s election last month.

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How did Argentina, so long notorious for political grievances that creep into every corner of society, keep politics out of football? Winning is a universal balm, of course, but there is more to the story. The team does its best to stay out of politics, and has kept Milei at arm’s length as he tries to make the squad’s success his own. It helps that not everyone in the Argentine footballing world likes the changes Milei wants to make to the way football is regulated.

Evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on morals and individual prosperity, is one force that draws players on the Brazilian and Colombian national squads toward Right-wing politicians — but the movement is relatively weak in Argentina, where Christianity has always been a feebler force than elsewhere in South America. Another key difference is that in Argentina, the political Left is dominated not by socialism, with its internationalist tendencies, but by nationalistic Peronism. The old grudge over the Falkland Islands — which resurfaced at the conclusion of last night’s match, when players raised a banner declaring the “Las Malvinas” rightfully belonged to Argentina — is nurtured almost more lovingly on the Peronist Left than on Milei’s Right, with its suspicious sympathies for Margaret Thatcher.

Ironically enough, one historical reason for this nationalistic unity has to do with immigration. As in the United States, socialism flourished in Argentina in the 19th century, but mainly as a second language, among recently arrived immigrants in an industrializing society. It was kept out of the political mainstream by an entrenched native elite, and when popular demands finally broke through decades later, they did so in a version shorn of international commitments. In this sense, Peronism in Argentina was Latin America’s answer to New Deal liberalism in the United States.

Whatever the causes, the effects are clear enough. Right-wing officials and the Peronist opposition jockey to see who can cheer the boys on louder, and no one has a second thought about donning the white and light blue. Countless Argentines who don’t share the views of Right-wing streamers see no reason why they should be associated with them. They want to bring home a fourth trophy, to suffer and celebrate as one. To be loved by your own is to disdain what the rest of the world thinks.

Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries. British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK. 

Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon. If you came across a minor character in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator. If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent. It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.

By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties. But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established. Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.

The friendliness didn’t last. The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina. The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans. This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.” Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.

Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position. There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”. In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.

And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations. Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership. They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British. Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over. 

This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy. Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands. Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.

When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. 

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There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control. There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail. Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle. “The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons. “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”

Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”

Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion. Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved. At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon. “We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath. 

There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says. “The old place has got no guts anymore.” And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”

It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era. The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result. That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation. 

The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces. On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?” The press did their bit. The Sun’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective. “We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone. We are going to play football.”

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Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes. The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker. “Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.

All this, of course, is ancient history now. Except that it’s not really. Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks. More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands. The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.

Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore. “Same old Argies — always cheating.” Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final. But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.

The rivalry lives on. From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it. All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors. There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed. The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.

Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored. The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost. Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect. Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted. His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain. At heart, it remains a family dispute.

I searched all afternoon for a punter who was enthusiastic about the Mayor’s vision of Englishness, but found none. The small crowd in the square consisted almost entirely of tourists who happened to be wandering by, and friends and family of the performers. As for those who had come to celebrate England and St George, they were hoping for something quite different. “We’re surprised there’s not more English here,” said one disappointed woman who had traveled with her husband from Crawley. She remarked that the day before, when a Sikh celebration had taken place in the square, it was “absolutely mobbed”. They wanted a strong turnout to make a statement of resurgent English pride, especially as, on a previous trip to London, they had bumped into a Palestine march where one of the demonstrators had allegedly told them “you’re not welcome here” after seeing the husband’s Union Jack phone cover. This struck a nerve, since he had, in fact, been born on the Old Kent Road. He pointed dramatically to the bronze lions around Nelson’s Column: “May 7th. Those lions are gonna roar again,” he said in reference to the local elections next month. 

Another man, a street sweeper who lives in Bow, gave me a similar account. “These wars, you know, Iran, Israel-Palestine, they’re protesting here every week, for no reason. This is a day for the British, for the English.” When I asked him about his 43 years living in the capital, he sucked his teeth. “It’s changed a lot, for the worse. Believe me.” He explained: “When I first got here it was very friendly, polite. You knew everyone, knew your neighbors. You don’t know your neighbors now. If you get on a bus or a train, you don’t know if someone’s going to pull out a knife and stab you.” Politicians, he said, “are only working for themselves”. Then he leaned in: “I think it’s time for the British to fight back.” 

This peculiar non-event in Trafalgar Square, and the discontent at its margins, illustrate some important realities. The first is that London is not in any meaningful sense an English city. It is the capital of a multinational state, the United Kingdom, whose hopes of surviving intact are at odds with England having a strong identity. But principally, the city is best understood as an island within an island, a place unto itself, or as the Victorians had it, “not a town but a country covered with houses”. When Khan calls it a “global city” he is mostly correct. Its economy has long been built on trade with the rest of the world, not England (although it does pay for England). In the 13 years that the capital was my home, most of the people I lived, worked or socialized with had either arrived as adults from overseas, or had moved there to escape England. Needless to say, the latter would have called themselves British. Two exceptions proved the rule: international football tournaments, when everyone became honorary Englishmen and women, and the cockneys I knew in Bethnal Green, remnants of an English-identifying community which has largely decamped to Essex. 

In Khan’s short video addressing the question “What does it mean to be English?”, he does of course imply that the capital is part of England. But on closer inspection, his idea of Englishness is defined by London rather than vice-versa. After nodding to the usual clichés — “fish and chips and a Sunday roast… our love of queuing, our incessant apologizing”— he moves onto “a tapestry made up of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas, woven together to tell one story”. He concludes that being English means “we stand up for what we believe in” (at which point the video shows a “Refugees Welcome” sign). The event in Trafalgar Square suggests that he views Englishness like any other identity in his scheme of managed diversity, whereby the authorities, like a nursery teacher negotiating with tired toddlers, ensure that every group gets its moment at the center of attention, flying its flags and performing its rituals in public space. 

None of this is entirely unique to Khan; it reflects the social realities of the city. In 2009, Conservative mayor Boris Johnson called for a “unifying” idea of Englishness, fit for a city that is “proud to showcase” its “many cultures and communities”. He also referred to St George as “a Cappadocian merchant who sold bacon to the Roman army”. Though Khan has gone further than his predecessors in building his personal brand on multiculturalism, no leader in London can ignore it. 

But the other point hinted at by Sunday’s event is that, even among those who are eager to celebrate it, English identity still seems to have little political content beyond protest. The small sample of unhappy patriots I met all came from deprived backgrounds; one of them said he had “lost the lottery of life” (a strange reversal of Cecil Rhodes’ claim that “to be born an Englishman is to win first prize in the lottery of life”). They wanted to push back against other groups they saw as taking over public space in the city, and they shared a feeling of injustice at the Government’s failure to control migration, as well as a more general impression that the city was sliding into chaos. As one man told me — a Scot, as it happens — “It’s not English anymore, that’s the truth. It’s been taken over. The system’s allowed it… The whole system’s failed. The courts, the police, probation, the prisons, the NHS. It’s all gone.” But as for any sense of what it means to be English, it was clear that they all saw Englishness not only as a subset of Britishness, but as inseparable from it. 

This seems consistent with the broader circumstances in which the rhetoric and symbols of Englishness have barged into the public realm over the past year. English flags have appeared, often alongside Union Jacks, at demonstrations outside asylum hotels, and of course as part of the last summer’s spasm of defiance, which saw flags going up on lampposts and motorway bridges across the country (variously interpreted as expressions of patriotism and attempts to intimidate minorities, both of which are probably true). In these cases, the St George’s Cross seems to draw more of its charge from the breaking of a taboo, the flag still being somewhat tarred by association with Right-wing extremism, than from any shared understanding of English identity. 

Even on those parts of the Right which are now espousing ethnic nationalism, there is no positive vision of English society beyond one that is governed and largely inhabited by people of English ancestry. There is not even much reckoning with the blatant contradiction that this favored group includes most of those who despise Englishness as a political identity, while excluding many non-ethnically English who would welcome opportunities for patriotism. Such complexities tend to be drowned out by the almost pornographic narratives of British decline that circulate online, often focused on London’s alleged collapse into anarchy. As the people I met at Trafalgar Square testified, this vision is disturbingly familiar to some of the city’s poorer inhabitants; but its purpose is clearly to galvanize a nationalism with more anger than plausible answers.

Englishness is trapped in these volatile and divisive modes because efforts to reimagine it have been feeble; the uneasiness of public figures such as Khan and Johnson on the subject, insisting that the flag must be “reclaimed” for everyone but struggling to show much enthusiasm for it, only confirms its subversive appeal. But the deeper reason is simply that a former English consciousness fell by the wayside. Look back to the 19th century, and much of the 20th, and English patriotism appears to blaze proudly. “England expects that every man will do his duty,” said Nelson at Trafalgar. “Speak for England, Arthur!” was the backbench cry that signaled Parliament’s resolve to confront Hitler. But in these and many other evocative examples, “England” was a synonym for Britain, as it remains in many foreign languages today. As Englishness blended into the wider British state in which it predominated, and then into that state’s global empire (“the empire of England”, as Benjamin Disraeli called it), it inevitably lost much of its particularity, paving the way for a reversal that has resulted in many English now thinking of themselves as British. 

Another peculiarity is that, as Robert Tombs notes in The English and their History, the country never had a particularly deep attachment to its folk traditions. To be sure, modern England has always been deeply invested in its past as an aesthetic matter: see, for instance, the much-mocked “Tudorbethan” facades of Thirties suburbs, and the sentimental love for the “green and pleasant land” of the English countryside. But in the crucial period when European countries saw their pre-modern heritage vanishing with the onset of industrialization — the period when cities like London bulged into mega-cities — the English, Tombs writes, were a “commercial and cosmopolitan” culture, which saw “no urgent need to discover their roots or throw off foreign influences, and were happy to buy in the good and the fashionable wherever it came from”. As a result, “English manifestations of ‘folk culture’ were pallid compared with the ebullient and assertive popular nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Finnish, and Russian art and music”. The consequences of this are still evident on St George’s Day, when, in my experience, people pressed to think of English folk traditions can name only Morris Dancing. 

This curtailed history has left Englishness with a mysterious, forlorn depth which has proven fertile for artistic expression, but which cannot be easily translated into politics. The poetry of Thomas Hardy and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams contain a rich sense of England’s landscapes and rhythms of life as treasures to be recovered only in dreams. A century later, a ghostly vision of England as something lost to history and myth can still be found in Jez Butterworth’s 2009 play Jerusalem, or in PJ Harvey’s 2011 album Let England Shake. There are jaundiced accounts of England too — Philip Larkin and John Betjeman come to mind — but even here, there is a certain irony and regret which seems to defy political expression. Perhaps the setting which most people instinctively recognize to be English is the countryside, where it is still possible to see past the fund managers’ mansions and newbuild estates and to imagine an innocent world of pubs and churches, hedgerows and lanes. It was only when I left London and formed a connection with the Sussex landscape that I felt, viscerally and unexpectedly, like I had found England. 

That this silent Englishness of culture and memory manages to exist apart from the St George’s Cross is surely something to be grateful for. A refuge from politics is not such a bad thing for a national identity to provide. But there is a more material problem, which pertains, again, to London. A more developed political Englishness would be valuable if it allowed different parts of the country to recognize their common cause in challenging the dominance of the capital, where too much power of every kind is concentrated.

During the 20th century, and especially since the Second World War, England’s impressive traditions of local government were sapped away by Westminster and Whitehall. The war effort, followed by the establishment of the NHS, the centralization of the planning and education systems, and the nationalization of industry, made for a stronger Britain at the expense of a weaker England. In the ensuing decades, as the country deindustrialized and globalized, London emerged as the overwhelming force in a service economy that relegated England’s other cities and regions to shadows of their former selves. The capital and the South East of England are the only parts of Britain that raise more revenue for the state than they receive. But they also enjoy favorable treatment. The data specialist and blogger Tom Forth has spent years arguing that Northern cities consistently lose out to London when it comes to investment in key areas such as transport, research and development and public institutions, even when they have the better economic case.  

Meanwhile, Britain remains far more centralized than its European peers, even as its state has increasingly proven unfit for the responsibility it hoards. So we find ourselves in a destructive situation whereby England must blame London, as a political center, for all of its problems, from hospitals and schools to energy bills and river pollution, while also relying on the metropolis for fiscal support. And London, of course, is where the country’s financial and cultural elites overwhelmingly cluster, appearing in the provinces only in the resented but sorely needed guise of tourists and second-home owners. There is arguably already a latent English identity in this shared ambivalence towards the capital; jokes about London and Londoners are current across the country. But they are not enough to bridge the local identities of the different counties, cities and regions, which must therefore struggle to claw back power from the center separately.

It is difficult to imagine how these differences could be bridged without a dedicated forum for English politics. But the Scottish and Welsh experience suggests that layering new capitals on top of London, while it can sustain devolved political cultures, also encourages further antagonism and the fudging of accountability. So England must somehow fight the center without a center of its own. That is the country’s tragedy: London occupies the place where its capital should be.

But less well known is the night the Queen also turned up at the West End’s Fortune Theatre. Bennett had a routine about an old worthy being turned on by hanging and flogging, still going strong on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties. That night, when he “half-said erection” on stage, Bennett writes in his latest diaries at the age of 91, might be the most risqué performance Her Majesty ever witnessed.

Over six decades on, Alan Bennett finds himself adrift in an England without the Queen — and one seemingly in need of relief from whatever 1961 was trying to send up. Enough Said is about Britain’s last literary national treasure getting old, and with it a sense of Englishness marching to its doom. This is a country floating off into the antithesis of Bennettland, where no one knows the local vicar and his famous monologues of quiet desperation have unfurled themselves into full blown howls. His old muses, those he termed “on the edges of emotion rather than their extremes, irritation rather than anger, melancholy rather than grief” have found a new voice.

Bennett’s people — the eccentrics, the repressed, those who slipped through the cracks into bedsits and cul-de-sacs from Harrogate to Camden — are now very much at the center of national life. But in 21st century England they are set free from the fustiness of his dramas. This is no country for Bennett’s wry world of letters to the Guardian or the sanctity of the National Theatre. Scions of England’s old artistic establishment which once embellished these manners, from Jonathan Miller to Maggie Smith, seem to pop up dead throughout Bennett’s pages with all the foreboding of bloated whales appearing on the beach.

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This set of diaries — his fourth — cover the years 2016-24. And, in theory, it’s a period rife with Bennett characters. There is Theresa May, the churchgoing would-be vicar’s wife who finds herself out of her depth and preyed upon by scheming old Etonians. There is the ambitious but hopeless Ed Miliband, rollicking around Hampstead to visit his mother on his bicycle, discussing the political “mess to be cleared up” with fawning pensioners. Even the working-class autodidact Joey Barton, “the difficult and sometimes violent footballer”, would, Bennett suggests on 19 September, 2016, “make a good character for something”. Britain’s Trump, he teases us in a brief February entry of that same annus horribilis, would be Jeremy Kyle, both “fixed permanently on self-seeking”.

In other words, all the classic Bennett material is here: the petty English grotesque with all its delusions and repressions. Yet amid it all, our most famous living playwright can’t quite seem to grasp the period. Even he has lost the classic drollness of his characters: Britain in the aftermath of Brexit is comparable to “Munich in 1938”. A Sikh family having a slap-up meal in a French restaurant is a “rebuke to Farage and co”. Unlike his anti-fascist diarist forebears, Hans Fallada interned in a Nazi lunatic asylum or a suicidal Walter Benjamin in transit, Bennett spends his time hobbling around cathedrals and fawning after John Bercow on the train to Grantham.

None of this is surprising. Bennett’s career, after all, may as well be a stand-in for the increasingly faulty compass of Britain’s liberal arts establishment: abandoning nuance or subtlety in its examination of daily life for a strange blend of spleen and whimsy. Having lost the feel for his life-long theme of “ordinariness”, whether through old age or distance or both, Bennett instead lurches for clumsy civilizational themes. “I owe everything to the state”, he writes mid-lament of the Brexit years, as if the problem with modern Britain is that we’ve abandoned our loyalty to civil servants and education boards.

These days, there is comically little to prop up this gentle England that once made Bennett. There are birthday cards from Rachel Reeves, encounters with Jon Snow, a cheerful immigrant railway worker hauling Alan onto the 9:20 to Leeds (he’s as big, Bennett tells us, as Idi Amin). When these self-consciously political titbits rub up against the gaudy, rebellious reality of contemporary England, the result verges on self parody. “The Christian Science Temple on Headingley Lane in Leeds… where on one of my solitary walks aged sixteen, I decided I was gay, has now been sold to Wetherspoons.” At times there is mere surrender: when Trump is elected after Brexit, the solution Bennett discovers is “to live without news: no paper, no TV, no comment.”

Why is Alan Bennett so popular? This is a question that seems to haunt him — and, with the deference he now attracts, a sense that the Bennett of 1961 might well have hated what he’s now become. The diaries betray a painful realization he has become a sort of literary Elizabeth II, a national treasure to prop up coziness and eccentricity, those traits so lacking in the country today. Admirers from Morrissey to interlopers at Leeds station lurk like sycophantic grim reapers, vaguely aware that some monarchal entity is about to pass forever into the annals of England. About to receive a retrospective at the height of the pandemic, with a revival of his seminal 1988 series Talking Heads, he regards the whole thing as out of step with the emergency raging around him. The National Gallery, upon making him a trustee, informs Bennett almost to his horror that he is “the man on the street”.

In settling on him, Bennett seems almost to realize that England has simply run out of ideas — or people — that define what really brings it together. The irony, of course, is that Bennett himself arguably helped launder the acceptable national character. At some point in the 21st century, he loses his touch. His “ordinariness” becomes mere twee and slightly camp, fawning to an increasingly tainted centre-left. Typical here is The History Boys, a 2004 paean to the idea of social mobility, northern multiculturalism and working-class autodidactism and which now feels as out-of-step with the present as Goodbye Mr Chips.

Far better to look for Bennett’s talent in Talking Heads, a now unthinkable feat of pessimistic television drama. Broadcast in the dying days of Thatcherism, each night the nation tuned in to watch monologues of Chekhovian bleakness about a nation apparently on the up. The theme here is one that still endures in 21st-century Britain, one that, as Bennett puts it in the introduction to the monologues, is the “valuable lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere”.

Here we get Graham Whittaker, the closeted homosexual living in a carefully ordained world of Harrogate tearooms, who nearly loses his beloved mother to a local spiv. Here we get Susan, a drinker and vicar’s wife, forced into Leeds to buy her booze and who ends up having a passionate affair with the Indian shopkeeper. And then there’s Irene Raddock, who lives alone near Bradford, lamenting the changes on her roads brought about by immigration, and penning furious letters to the authorities about the strange goings on of her new neighbors — until she is arrested and sent to prison.

The details may have changed, but the themes have not: quiet loathing, paranoia, madness, the loss of control in everyday life. To draw empathy from these downward spirals is the genius Bennett once achieved. A self-confessed snob in his early years — perhaps spurred on by his father’s aspirations of moving to Guildford when he was a boy — meant Bennett became attuned to the anxieties of the English upper-working and lower-middle classes. Yet he treated them with the sort of respect deserving of sad, regular people desperate for some control in their lives. The plight of these types seems lost in the latest diaries. Instead, we are surrounded by luvvies and arse-kissers, egging on the sort of wounded sentimentality that presently lies at the root of England’s inability to face up to itself.

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Enough Said is haunted by these figures. Miriam Margolyes calls from Australia, concerned she’s not done justice to her performance in Lady in a Van. Bennett drolly remarks on her penchant for crudeness and swearing, criticized in his own later scripts, as if tacitly acknowledging the monster he has spawned. Then, of course, comes the pandemic, a sort of bad Bennett pastiche in the hands of his inheritors. Captain Tom, a Yorkshireman himself, beguiles the nation with an act of Herculean quirkiness. The nightly news bulges with Bennett’s daily preoccupations: immigrant care workers, bossy village hall matrons enforcing the rules.

But all this is lost on Bennett, who seems to have lost any real sense as a dramatist for the English ordinary in the 21st century. And if the writer himself seems happier wallowing in progressive abstractions, what passes for ordinariness today has been shorn of its poignancy. Instead, we have set pieces like Gogglebox, where those that lived in Bennett’s imaginary world simply gawp and point at the TV. As for the National Theatre, the Guardian, the BBC — all these are plagued by a new deference, to the Lionesses and the NHS. But who, then, will define our new English ordinary, that inchoate, irrational blend of deference to Bennett’s old Britain and its howling new anger? After all, there are still Irene Raddocks and Graham Whittakers lurking in England’s towns and villages. It’s just that no one’s there to speak for them.

Reflecting on his lewd performance before Elizabeth II, Bennett recalls his father, in his “eternal trilby and raincoat”, taking off his cap before the Queen’s motorcade in Headingley in 1966. “Where the gesture came from I can’t think,” he writes. “But somewhere, almost a surprise to himself, he was a loyal subject. And the same I suppose goes for me.” Here is the most honest admission of something his diaries never quite confront in this new England. Soon, after all, we will have lost the last English dramatist capable, perhaps, of truly understanding that conflicted emotion without condescending it.

Instead, as Hutchinson declares, it is precisely in mythmaking that nationalism draws its power, as disaffected intellectuals, and particularly artists, find themselves “generating at times of crises novel myths based on romantic acts of sacrifice by heroic elites that legitimize new national projects”.

Such was the director John Boorman’s explicit task with his 1981 epic Excalibur. It is “The Dark Ages”, the title sequence flashes portentously over Wagner, when “The Land Was Divided And Without A King”. As academics have noted, Boorman’s masterwork was released “shortly after Britain’s winter of discontent”, and “can be seen as a reaction to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, meditating on a Britain in decay, presided over by the female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher”. Yet if Excalibur is a critique of Thatcher’s Britain, it is not obviously one made from the political Left. The film’s driving fixation with will, heroic destiny, and the mystical unity of land and leader is strikingly transgressive to postwar liberalism. “I believe that the popular, lasting stories are really about great deep psychic events in human his­tory that have bitten themselves into the racial memory and which we remember in our unconscious,” Boorman would later write. “The retelling of these stories is like the rediscovery of them — it ‘catharizes’ and then gives solace.”

In Boorman’s intention to reattach Britain to its mythical roots, and so restore the nation’s mystic and psychic unity — the director is a convinced Jungian — Excalibur is overtly a work of cultural nationalism. Indeed, it is arguably the most deeply British, or at least consciously British film ever made: even more so for the fact that the names “Britain” or “England” are never once uttered. The ultimate, sacred source of yearning and duty is always “the Land”, tapping into and devoting itself to something far older than the modern British state, now palpably withering around us.

Excalibur’s immediate genesis was in Boorman’s failed attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings, whose “great brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth”, the director declared, was “the Unterwelt of my own mind”. Yet unlike Tolkien, who viewed Ireland “as a country naturally evil”, haunted by a deep and ancient malignance emanating from its very bogs, trees and mountains, and only “held in check by the great devotion of the southern Irish to their religion”, Boorman found in the dramatic mountain landscape that had become his home a source of great and regenerative artistic power. “The valley in the Wicklow hills where my house sits is as close to Middle Earth as you can get in this depleted world,” Boorman would write, “The soft, feminine folds of the hills, the bleak bogs, the ancient oak woods, the black lakes, the urgent streams somehow corresponded to an inner landscape… It felt like a setting for the Arthurian legend.”

And, indeed, the Arthurian epic Boorman would create is dependent, for its visual appeal, on the Irish landscape surrounding his home: “with a few exceptions, all the scenes in Excalibur were shot within a couple of miles of my house.” In Ireland, the director had found an aesthetic hyper-Britain where the hills were steeper, the forests gloomy and primeval wildwood, and, most importantly, water was ever-present. Excalibur is surely the dampest film ever made on land: battles are fought in ice-cold moats, knights clash in front of plunging waterfalls and babbling streams or, drowning, find psychic truths in the weedy beds of lakes. His characters crawl and die in mud, their glittering armor sinking into the land itself. The woods themselves, wet with dew or shrouded in lake-mist, their moss and lichen-covered trunks and boulders lit a lurid green to heighten the raw, natural power emanating from them, are palpably rank with leaf-mold and mildew: it is the only film ever to capture the uncanny magic of our native Atlantic rainforests.

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Even the air, and light itself, is heavy with water, for “the Irish climate is heartbreaking to a filmmaker — unpredictable, constantly changing, but mostly raining”. It rained steadily for almost every day of the five-month production, Boorman said later, with the rare bursts of sunlight breaking through capturing a luminosity more intense for its doomed struggle against the Irish rain. Yet unlike Kubrick, Boorman would later praise the “wonderful light in Ireland, because it’s moist, because there’s so much moisture in the air even when it’s not raining that you get this refraction, this light, so you get a kind of softness”. That, he suggested, lent the film a hazy dreamlike radiance that “felt like a myth rather than reality.” In just this way, Boorman’s understanding of his native England was refracted through Ireland’s clarifying light.

Even still, only England could have made him. In Boorman’s personal mythology, both woods and water are central, fitting for the director of both the riparian horror of Deliverance and the pre-lapsarian fantasia of The Emerald Forest. Growing up in wartime London — his film memoir of the time, Hope and Glory, opens with the future director playing with a toy knight and wizard in the suburban rockery that served as mountain forest to the child’s imagination — Boorman was formed, he tells it, in a once-enchanted land that had only just lost its magic. As he writes in his autobiography, Suburban Boy, the “Tudor gables, leaded panes, bow windows” of suburbia — “eclectic fragments from pre-Industrial Revolution England” — masked the hard truth that “This was a new land and the England of old was gone for ever. Oh, what the English inflicted on the English: misery, deprivation and bondage on a scale quite equal to that visited upon their colonial vassals.”

Mocking the attachment of his father, George, to the Union Jack-and-Royal Family patriotism of the Westminster state, the young Boorman nevertheless remarks with wonder that, in his youth as a soldier in the Great War, like a warrior saint, the “young George, who lived to see a man walking on the moon, rode into battle against the Turks with a drawn sword on an Arab mare”. Though of London’s low church lower-middle class, Boorman’s parents would send him, for unromantic and practical reasons, to a cost-effective Catholic private school that was “my first contact with Irishness in all its glory and grim horror”, so seizing his imagination that “Ireland was to have an insidious influence on my life and work, drawing me and keeping me there for thirty years almost against my will”.

“During my Catholic schoolboy experience,” Boorman observes in his second memoir, Conclusions, “I used to study the holy water in those little enameled troughs that hung on the wall of the chapel. You dipped your finger in and crossed yourself. Here was a magical mystery: a priest could pray over ordinary water and invest it with spiritual power.” For Boorman, inverting Tolkien’s moral view of Ireland, “I felt Catholicism was only skin deep, that underneath it was a pagan place.” It could just as easily be said that Boorman’s English paganism had developed a markedly Irish Catholic flavor. Either way, the war would soon give Boorman his own watery baptism into the old ways.

Released from suburban boredom by the German bomb that destroyed his unloved house, the young director and his family moved to his grandfather’s wooden bungalow along the wooded stretch of the Thames at Shepperton. Skipping school, playing in and along the river, once he fell into the rushing waters of an open lock: “I opened my eyes to a turbulent green world… I exhaled and sucked water in again. No longer struggling, I felt a perfect ease as I breathed my beloved river. I was the river.” Rescued by his brother, “I resented the violent intrusion into my communion with water.” We see this scene recast in Excalibur, made mythic, in the drowning vision of Sir Percival, shedding his armor in the weeds, which permits him to find the secret of the Grail, that “You and the Land are one.”

Once, idly shooting a kingfisher with boyish callousness along the Thames’ wooded banks, Boorman “was consumed with shame and remorse. I had killed the spirit of the river, god’s messenger: the kingfisher. Something broke in me. I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored,” a quest he would seek in filmmaking. For all Ireland’s influence, then, Excalibur is the product of his deeply English imagination: “my childhood in river and oak forest had been steeped in the legend.” Even so, like many others before and after him, from Edmund Spenser to Paul Kingsnorth, Boorman’s Irish exile crystallized his English romanticism into something harder, and sharper.

“When I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place,” Boorman writes. In his extraordinary film autobiography, I Dreamt I Woke Up, the director pens a dreamlike ode to the Church of Ireland rectory and 100 acres of forest he called home, set above the wooded, holy fjord of Glendalough. We see him planting trees, conversing with bog bodies and roguish peasants, setting up carved standing stones and swimming with a friendly priest in his own private stretch of the river Avonmore. The enclave, a wild and haunted place, was sacred to the Irish mystic and hermit Saint Kevin, revered for his attachment to nature, and long before him, at least in Boorman’s personal mythos, it had been a site of great power in native Irish belief. Even in Boorman’s own time, he writes, the local Church of Ireland vicar reverted to Druidism under Glendalough’s spell, now blessing births and weddings with oak fronds in the flowing waters. “The druids, the Dark Ages, the monks in the monastery up the way; the cruelty of man and nature,” all here came together in Glendalough’s primeval oak forest, for Boorman “the atavistic homeland, the repository of fairy tales and myth”.

Conveniently close to Dublin society, Boorman’s bohemian village of Annamoe was also once a favored spot for Anglo-Irish literary artistic converts to Irish cultural and political nationalism. The Gaelic Revivalist playwright J.M. Synge, whose brother was once Annamoe’s Protestant rector, “wrote in this room where I now write”, Boorman is pleased to relate. Iseult Gonne, Yeats’ muse, had lived there in “the smallest castle in all of Ireland, a castellated doll’s house”, with her husband, the writer Francis Stuart, who would spend the war making propaganda broadcasts on Nazi Germany’s Redaktion Irland radio service (while Iseult, from whom he was separated, would harbor a German spy in her faux-medieval folly). The Edwardian British imperialist and thriller-writer Erskine Childers was a scion of Glendalough’s landowning family, and following his conversion to Irish revolutionary nationalism, was hunted down by the forces of the Free State in his own family’s Big House: before being executed as the military commander of the anti-treaty IRA. What made these children of Ireland’s Protestant ruling caste, so dependent on British rule, in Glendalough nevertheless throw in their lot with a highly-mythicized and Irish nationalism? Whether quirks of personal temperament, the grand and impersonal logic of social forces, or simply of the spirit of place, the same strange magic also cast its spell on Boorman.

And so, in Excalibur, we see Boorman create in Ireland his highly aestheticized hyperreal Britain, in which he restores his rejected, blighted native land to the world of myth. The film, which asserts itself to be an adaptation of Mallory, in fact plays with the entire Arthurian corpus: Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” are in there, along with T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Tolkien’s syncretic national dreamtime, and even Monty Python’s then-recent satirical effort. Boorman is not retelling the myth, but playing with the building blocks of myth itself. Setting the film at a moment when, as Merlin puts it, “The one God comes to drive out the many gods, the spirits of wood and stream go silent,” Boorman nevertheless spurns the Romano-British historicizing of Rosemary Sutcliff for a dream of the High Middle Ages. “We were taking it out of time, out of period, into the world of myth,” Boorman would later remember. “It’s a great mistake trying to make it real [because] the myth is much stronger than the reality.”

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As Hutchinson, undercutting the attempted debunking of nationalism’s demonstrable power by advocates of the modernist thesis like Hobsbawm and Gellner, observes, “many theorists have regarded nationalists as inventors of tradition and their claims to continuities with the past as either self-delusion or a form of deceit”. Yet this is simply a category error. Instead, we should see nationalism’s conscious appeal to myth as something akin to Boorman’s creative process, “a quest for an alternative world which is more satisfactory than the one we live in”, as the director states, “hopefully a bit better, braver, more beautiful than it was”. In the 21st century just as much as the 19th, a shimmering dream of the past stands as both a rebuke to the dysfunctions and humiliations of the present, and as a vision of the future to come. Rather than a retreat to past glories, real or imagined, as its detractors assume, nationalism’s appeal to myth is a modernizing, futurist mission, which recreates the present as an anomalous Dark Age to be overcome. Just as Hutchinson observes, against the dead hand of tradition, at moments of national crisis, historically  “national revivalists argued that it was a misunderstanding to conceive of tradition as a passive repetition of custom. Traditionalists must recognize that tradition had continually to be renewed.” We see just this process in Boorman, beating together the varied ancient and modern components of the Arthur myth, to forge something new in service of his own spiritual and opaquely political purpose of personal and national regeneration. Or as he pithily declared, “Realism is limited and boring — and fundamentally dishonest. It doesn’t tell the truth.”

And so, light gleams from his heroes’ burnished Gothic armor, beaten from polished aluminum for added brilliance, as if glowing from within. Boorman would later write that the 19th-century fantasia of Neuschwanstein, a classic product of German romantic nationalism, is far superior to any medieval relic. His is an extraordinarily Victorian dream of the Middle Ages, drawing from the same cultural wellsprings as the Gothic Revival, of Young England, whose romantic Tory peers would joust in armor to banish industrialism and its democratic excesses, as the pre-Raphaelites whose visual imagery Boorman would freely plunder, and indeed from the Wagnerian epics whose most bombastic sequences punctuate the film’s soundtrack.

Writing and filming his epic in an Irish setting that inspired the romantic nationalism of disaffected intellectuals, Boorman thus draws directly from the same Romantic aesthetics and impulses as England’s abortive and Germany’s ominous classical nationalism, essentially leaning on them for his film’s mythic power. He even openly reworked the aesthetics of fascism in his bricolage, as just another source of primal, irrational power, to some disquiet from critics. Knights kneel, as lightning strikes, before a blood-red solar cross; the inlaid marble knotwork patterning of the Round Table owes more, visually, to Wewelsburg, favored castle of the SS, than it does to Tintagel. Indeed, the film was particularly poorly received in West Germany, where its imagery of torchlit ceremonies, and of glittering knights riding forth under red pennants to battle for their sacred leader, all set to the most stirring excerpts of Wagner and Carl Orff, did not chime with the mood of the moment. What is the meaning of Percival’s Grail revelation that “you and the land are one”, after all, but nationalism’s great mystery of faith for which men sacrifice themselves? Boorman draws on the headiest strain of politics for his art, plundering nationalism for effect, as a dark and double-edged magic of fearsome power.

And like nationalism, when viewed from those outside its spell, the film is utterly ridiculous. It possesses, throughout, a definite end-of-pier quality. The performances are strange and stilted, Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is oddly camp and slapstick, and the whole thing is in the worst possible taste, a monument to excess as absurd as anything by Ken Russell. As a narrative, it barely hangs together; yet it is driven forward by imagery of strange and compelling power. Battles in bluebell woods, dead knights hanging from Mordred’s thorn tree, food for crows; the glittering, barely Christian wedding sequence, as if overseen by Glendalough’s renegade vicar; the apple orchards blossoming back into life as, restored by the Grail, Arthur leads his knights towards their final battle: and everywhere the presence of gushing, living water. We begin to believe, despite ourselves, that Boorman has indeed tapped into some Jungian essence, something that could only spring from the deep memory of these islands.

“When you’re in that state of grace where you’re wholly concentrated on making the film, you can draw on unconscious forces to help you,” Boorman writes, with absolute sincerity. “For a century now, we’ve been rushing headlong into the future; we’ve made a cult out of progress and we’ve forgotten our former selves, our former patterns of behavior, whose origins can be traced to the Middle Ages. We no longer have roots,” he mourned, and so, purely for our own survival, there is now “a pressing need to investigate the Matter of Britain”.

And it is only because of Boorman’s sincerity that any of it works. The vision of the just and rightly ordered state, of the Grail, and the restorative power to be found, if only searched for, in the land itself: he means all of it, with religious fervor, and it is enough to carry us along with him. A London mystic like Blake, he had found in Ireland not his Jerusalem but a dream of Camelot, sleeping dormant in the native woods and waters of these ancient, sacred isles. In Excalibur, more than any other modern adaptation, the great tradition has been worked on, made anew and handed on, glittering, to us. “I felt great satisfaction in having made it against all the odds,” Boorman writes, “It was a lifelong quest: I had found the Grail.” Like any national revivalist of the 19th century, or Anglofuturist of today, he perceived that the only way to cut our way out of the wreckage of modernity lay in reshaping the myths of a golden past to arm us for the great struggles ahead.

Picture them as corrupted versions of Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee: bewitched by mischievous supernatural forces and on a quest to massacre an Ent. Arriving at the ancient place, Carruthers wields the chainsaw while Graham holds the camera. Around them Storm Agnes shrieks her protests, while the ghosts of Roman centurions gaze impassively on. Jagged steel bites deep into sycamore sap. The canopy teeters, then falls ignominiously to earth. Afterwards, Carruthers takes his wedge back to the baby’s cradle. The child wakes, crying — as does the horrified world. The spell is broken. Gamgee betrays Frodo to the police, and they both get banged up for four years apiece.

This, minus a few flourishes, is the morality tale offered by Channel 4’s new two-part documentary about Sycamore Gap, though it is disguised as a quaintly rural police procedural. Northumbrian pipes drone in the background as a section of the trunk is uncovered on a slab, as if for an autopsy. A commenting detective seems embarrassed to spell things out: “In this case, the victim is … for want of a better word … the tree, really.” The camera lingers over the wounds, unfettered by the usual concern for respecting the decency of the dead.

In happier times, the sycamore had been visually compelling to visitors, partly because it was so solitary. The barren landscape enhanced its numinous dignity, as did the near-symmetry of the steep banks on either side. For years people had made pilgrimages, asked for engagement blessings, fertilized its roots with the ashes of their loved ones. The tree had seemed resilient ­— even invincible — much older than its 130 years. Back in 2003, it had survived a near-extinction event, narrowly avoiding a collision with a BBC helicopter carrying Alan Titchmarsh.

Slumped and surly on hard plastic chairs at the police station, Carruthers and Graham each tried to deny the crime, but the evidence was all there on their phones. There were voice recordings suggesting they reveled in the public attention. There was a wedge of greenwood, photographed in the boot of Graham’s car. There were even what police called “the owl photographs”: pictures of Carruthers grinning idiotically in his workshop, inexplicably holding some baby owls. Behind him were 11 chainsaws. He had told the police he had none.

And of course, there was the video of the act itself. Documentary viewers see it in the second episode. Filmed in the dark, the blurry footage and eerie noises have something of a horror movie. I had to suppress my urge to look away. Afterwards, various locals reflect on camera about how stupid the defendants were to leave a visual record of their crime. They don’t seem to realize that this was surely part of the point.

When the story first hit the national news, Carruthers texted Graham “Here we go”. A detective recalls on camera how she started to wonder: “Is this why they’ve done it? Are they doing this because they want to be famous?” Carruthers seemed much more interested in his nocturnal escapade than in his newborn, despite a tribute to her being the pretext. On the night itself, his partner sent him a film of their daughter feeding. Came the text back: “I’ve got a better video than that.”

Perhaps, then, there was a spell cast upon the pair after all: not so much by Cumbrian boggarts or Northumbrian fairies, ­but rather by the little folk in their phones. Thousands of visual representations of the tree were already in the public domain. It had featured in films, television programs, pop videos, endless Facebook posts and Instagram reels. In making their mark on this icon, did an envious Carruthers and Graham imagine they were stealing some of the magical aura for themselves? At the trial, Carruthers claimed incomprehension at all the fuss: “It was just a tree.” Still, it was a special enough tree that he felt moved to drive 36 miles in a storm to chop it down.

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Apparently, most locals didn’t realize that the sycamore was special either, until, in 1991, it appeared in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. As an elderly resident from the nearby town of Haltwhistle said: “Sycamore Gap was just a tree on Hadrian’s Wall, nobody ever thought about it, talked about it, or nothing, until Kevin Costner came to do the film there … The tree looked absolutely fantastic.” A market developed for mementos in its image: paintings, jewelry, even tattoos. Said a local publican: “People come into the pub at least a dozen times a day, and they say ‘can you tell me where the tree is, the one that used to be in Robin Hood?’”

Also in the documentary, there are expressions of fury and grief from longstanding and particularly ardent Sycamore Gap-lovers. Many of them seem equally unable to separate the real tree from images of the tree. “I was 100% in mourning” said one man, moved to tears by the loss. Before its demise, he wistfully recalled, “I would post on social media ‘Hey the tree’s looking good today!’ … it would get thousands of reactions.”

In the aftermath of the crime, academics rushed to analyze what precisely had been taken. Why was there quite so much public grief? Some thought it was a violation of a sense of the natural world as “home”. Others concluded that our “need for trees might run deeper than we think”. But I’m afraid this is all too politically convenient. I don’t think the furor was really about the natural world at all, nor even about trees in general. The whole episode can tell you practically nothing about the gorgeous sycamore growing anonymously in the corner of a wood near your house.

The tree in its historic setting of Hadrian’s Wall was certainly a lovely and resonant object. But it was surely its fame in the eyes of others that imbued it with most of the prestige. The more that people made films about it, or took selfies in front of it, the more prestigious and alluring it got. In this sense, the tree was like any sacred object, manmade or natural. New visitors found it particularly meaningful, knowing that lots of other people had previously found it meaningful too.

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But equally, the meaning was more profane than this reference to the sacred suggests; for it was mostly tied to imagined admiring gazes from other people. A lot of enjoyment of the tree came from thinking of exotic others — film stars, pop stars, influencers — enjoying it first. In a sense, then, actual deep connection in the here and now was deferred.

It’s hard to get people to care about nature: to turn it from background to foreground. The consensus among relevant English heritage organizations seems to be to lean into social media as a tool for sparking engagement, but I wonder if it doesn’t defeat its own purpose. Not far from me is Birling Gap and the Seven Sisters, where a steady stream of tourists also traipse, bathing in the glow reflected by thousands of previous representations. They take their selfies, eat their picnics, and have a lovely time. But I’m not entirely sure they really look at the cliffs.

Viewed in this light, both the outraged public response and the draconian prison sentence that followed the crime invite a new interpretation. There was criminal damage not only to a living tree, but also to a fantasy object that made people feel specially connected to glamorous others elsewhere. Carruthers and Graham didn’t just chop down a sycamore — they destroyed an infinite number of future selfies. “For me, it’s an attack on the way people live”, reflected the chief police investigator in the documentary. In a sense, he was probably right.

But let us not be too bleak. In an instructive folk tale, there is often a hopeful ending. The hapless woodcutters still languish in prison, thankfully beyond the reach of any early release scheme from the Home Secretary. Twelve green shoots are now reported to be sprouting from the remains of the Sycamore Gap trunk. And most important of all, visitors have started taking dramatic pictures of the stump.

For many, the notion of a foreign coach is anathema: isn’t international football supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs? At the very least, for England to turn abroad feels like an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that the English system is not producing high-level coaches and managers. And Tuchel is not just foreign: he is German, and for the past century nothing has seemed quite so obviously inimical to England as Germany.

The wars color everything. Even when Germany aren’t involved, it’s common enough to hear England fans singing “Ten German Bombers”, gleefully emphasizing the countdown after “the RAF from England shot them down”, or humming the theme to The Great Escape or The Dam Busters. It’s hard to imagine that changing just because England now have a German manager.

Yet this feels a significant step. When England faced Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, The Mirror mocked up Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in military helmets and with the headline, “Achtung, Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over”. It’s hard to imagine England could even have contemplated a German manager then; even the appointment of a Swede, when Sven-Göran Eriksson got the job in 2001, provoked apoplexy in the Mail, which screamed, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”. And yet there is Tuchel, broadly accepted, leading England into a World Cup qualifying campaign.

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Tuchel actually seems rather more popular in England than in Germany, where his neo-vegetarian nerdery sat uncomfortably at Bayern Munich. But when things go wrong for him in the England job, he will be accused of not understanding “our” game. Even his interim predecessor Lee Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but played for Ireland, faced howls of protest in some quarters for his refusal to sing the anthem — not a political act, he explained, but because he felt singing would disrupt his focus. Tuchel has said he needs to “earn the right” to sing the anthem, a politically adroit policy, but whether he does so or not, an awareness of his nationality will in part shape reactions. The entire recent history of Anglo-German relations, in fact, can be traced through football.

There were the tentative early meetings in the Thirties, when England was broadly disdainful of German football and its high-minded decision to remain amateur. This was an ethos that was quickly adopted by the Nazis and repackaged into sensuous propaganda by Leni Riefenstahl. Professional sport, it was decreed after the Anschluss, was a Jewish perversion. As a result, the highly successful Austrian league was forced to return to amateurism and a great footballing culture was destroyed. A month before that announcement, in June 1938, England had already, in the spirit of appeasement, given the Nazi salute before a 6-3 win in Berlin.

There may be a level of irony to the chant of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” — not least because Germany have won four World Cups — but when England won their only World Cup in 1966, beating West Germany in the final, the Second World War was very much on people’s minds, a point made by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers. The evidence of bombing was still evident in many cities, while every adult knew somebody who had been killed in the fighting. The maths is obvious, but the point is worth stressing: that final came just 21 years after VE Day, and the events of the war were less distant than today is from 9/11.

Certainly there was an awareness on the German side of the need for sensitivity. Their coach was Helmut Schön, who had fled the Soviet zone for the West in May 1950. He had been an air-raid warden in Dresden and seen terrible things. “Women lay in the streets”, he wrote in his autobiography, “charred black or dried out like Egyptian mummies. They had children in their arms, bundles of ashes.” When the fires were extinguished, 30,000 charred corpses were stacked up by the Kreuzkirche and the job the firestorm had begun was finished off with flamethrowers. “We were used to gigantic numbers, including the victims of our own country”, Schön said. “That was abstract. Now we could see the reality: 30,000 individual people who had died terrible deaths.”

Yet Schön, who spent five days hunting through the smoking rubble for his father, seems to have harbored no sense of bitterness against Britain. His family was liberal, and had rented out an apartment to a Jewish publisher until as late as 1939. Schön had no doubt who was to blame for the war and told his players before they came to England in 1966 that what mattered was less whether they won than whether they “behaved like gentlemen”. Their job was to rehabilitate the international image of Germany.

Although England beat West Germany in the final, that meeting at Wembley turned out to be the first part of a five-act sequence that would overturn their respective footballing statuses. West Germany achieved a first-ever win over England in a friendly in 1968, a game whose significance was widely ignored in England but gave West Germany great self-confidence. West Germany then came from 2-0 down to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in 1970, before outplaying England in beating them 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final in 1972. L’Équipe described the German performance as “football from the year 2000”. In the second leg in Berlin, England, apparently giving up any hope of turning the tie around, played out an aggressive and negative 0-0 draw. In less than a decade, West German football had accelerated past England: it was the future; England some moribund relic. After West Germany’s economic miracle, anybody looking at the relative economies of the two countries might have drawn a similar conclusion.

Although Schön was still manager as West Germany won the World Cup on home soil in 1974, when England didn’t even qualify, he had become an oddly distant figure. The players had threatened strike action over bonuses before the tournament, something Schön, who came from a generation with a clear sense of patriotic duty, couldn’t comprehend. When West Germany then lost to East Germany in the first group stage, he had some sort of breakdown with the result that the captain Franz Beckenbauer effectively took over: the generation of self-assertive boomers were led by one of their own.

But whatever reservations there were, at home and abroad, about the behavior of certain German players, they kept beating England, most notably in the semi-final of both the 1990 World Cup, their last tournament before reunification, and Euro 96, their first tournament as a united nation. Players such as Jürgen Klinsmann, who had family in the East and regarded football as a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of rapprochement, were baffled by the English obsession with a war half a century in the past.

In the flush of victory in 1990, Beckenbauer, by then the manager, had said that he felt sorry for other nations because a united Germany would be unbeatable. It has not turned out like that, although Germany did win the 2014 World Cup. In competitive games since 2000, England actually have the edge, with three wins to two (including their famous 5-1 World Cup qualifying win in Munich).

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Yet German coaching is far more influential than English coaching. There is a discernible German School, born out of Swabia, that prioritizes winning the ball back as soon as possible by the high-risk deployment of players high up the pitch — Gegenpressing. The likes of Jürgen Klopp, Jogi Löw, Ralf Rangnick, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann and, yes, Tuchel, led the resistance to the hegemonic possession-heavy style favored by Pep Guardiola.

There is no English School. The Premier League might be the best league in the world. It’s certainly the richest. But what that means is that it imports talent, coaches in particular. There are only two English managers in the Premier League. And that perhaps is why there has been so little outcry about Tuchel. It’s less that England has suddenly become a mature and cosmopolitan nation than that the Premier League is essentially a global league that happens to be played in England.

Just as you can wander through parts of London and barely see a building that isn’t owned by Saudis or Russians or Japanese, so our football clubs are owned by oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge funds. These potentates then appoint the best coaches — or at least the coaches they believe to be the best — with no parochial interest in developing local talent. So everybody gets used to the idea that the best coaches are foreign. And now that English academies have, after their overhaul following the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, begun to turn out high-level playing talent, it seems logical that the best coach to lead them into the World Cup should be foreign, even if he is German.

For a nation that can’t help selling off its assets and institutions, this is a decision rooted in pragmatism. And so we end up with a situation where the man appointed to make it two World Cups would have been on the other side in the two World Wars.

Perhaps that’s just what reconciliation looks like. Perhaps it’s just modern England.

Many others piled in. “My mother was born in Nazi Germany and had to flee for her life,” wrote David Baddiel. “I’m OK with it. So fuck off.” Much was aimed at the Daily Mail. One comment which captured the spirit of anti-Daily Mailers simply said: “Ha ha ha ha!.. I’m loving this appointment, if only for how much it triggers the little englander gammons.” A Labour councillor had the same thought: “It’s exactly the kind of pathetic Little Englander comment expected from the Mail.”

The reaction to Tuchel’s appointment certainly reveals much about Britain today. One obvious conclusion is that to be a “Little Englander” remains the ultimate faux pas in polite society, universally understood as a bad thing combining all that is wrong and embarrassing about our country: small-minded, parochial, uncouth and, well, embarrassing.

Rather than being a distinctive set of views, Little Englandism is more of a sensibility marking out the stupid in the eyes of their betters. See, for instance, how the former Sun editor turned anti-Brexit commentator, David Yelland, described the recent brouhaha about Taylor Swift’s security as “utterly ridiculous, Little Englander, pathetic and damaging to the reputation of the country”. What will the neighbours think remains the most powerful instinct in English life and a core tenet of anti-Little Englandism. A large dose of the shame many felt, and feel, about Brexit is reputational.

To admit to being in any way uncomfortable with Tuchel’s appointment is, then, to reveal a characteristic that automatically makes you suspect, perhaps even a little conservative — or worst of all, Brexity. The historian Linda Colley has described Little Englandism as the reaction to the loss of Empire, or “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, as she put it: “A cleaving to the small and the relatively known in the face of alarm or fatigue or disgust at the prospect of the very large and very strange.”

“Cleaving to the known” is not a respectable look any more. What is prized is a sense of well-travelled ease and gentle sophistication: to understand what everything means on the menu and to abhor the kind of English nationalism that is the preserve of the “skinheads, lager louts, and soccer hooligans”, as the New Yorker put it in an essay on Brexit. This was the essential analysis of the Irish historian Fintan O’Toole, too, who believed such Little Englandism had been largely suppressed “until David Cameron blithely gave it a vast stage in June 2016”.

But it did not always carry this connotation. It was originally adopted in the late 19th century to criticise those who opposed the British empire. The term was adopted by Britain’s most enthusiastic imperialists whose poet and prophet was Rudyard Kipling, and who had used his “Recessional”, first printed in the Times in 1897, to warn Britain that it must take up imperial duties, lest:

If drunk with the sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law.

As J.B. Priestley wrote in The Edwardians, not everyone shared that view. “I remain a ‘Little Englander’,” he wrote, irrespective of the label, “believing that no people are good enough to rule other people thousands of miles away.” But this understanding of Little Englandism has almost entirely vanished.

It was during post-war Britain that it changed subtly from meaning small-minded socialist opposition to empire, to small-minded socialist opposition to Europe. In the parliamentary debates over the Schuman declaration of 1950 — proposing a new supranational entity called the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to today’s EU — Winston Churchill was mocked from the Labour benches for his “champagne” continentalism, which was contrasted with their “honest draft” of British socialism that they represented. At the time, most Conservative Eurosceptics were “empire loyalists” who could not be defined as Little Englanders because they were concerned primarily with maintaining British power overseas.

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As the winds of change blew through the British empire, the instinct to attack Little Englanders passed from the old imperialists to the new pro-Europeans who saw the EEC as a vehicle to protect British influence in the world. Just as Colley identified Little Englandism as “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, so too is British pro-Europeanism.

For Ted Heath, the first — and last — genuinely federalist prime minister to hold office, Europe was always the means to make Britain great again. From the beginning, then, the animating spirit of Britain’s pro-European movement has been tied up with a desire for greatness — or at least relevance. A good example of this tendency came in an interview with the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, who described how he came back from a recent trip around Europe “profoundly depressed… nobody mentions the UK”.

Worse even than the neighbours sniggering at us, then, is the neighbours forgetting that we’re here. Do the Little Englanders not understand this? “What should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling asked. Priestley’s response was simple enough: “A great deal Imperialism chose to ignore.” “While it was busy painting so much of the world map a bright red, hundreds of thousands of houses down England’s mean streets could have done with a lick of paint.” It is an argument that has never really changed.

What is so striking about the evolution of the idea of Little Englandism in post-war Britain is that it managed to retain its negative connotation while completely changing who it applied to. And as with the reaction to Tuchel, it is possible to catch glimpses of this evolution through football.

As Dominic Sandbrook points out in his account of the early Seventies, State of Emergency, when Heath signed the Treaty of Accession taking Britain into the EEC, the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, chose to display his patriotic disinterest by not only staying in Britain to avoid giving his blessing, but going to a football match. He was an ordinary Englishmen.

Attempting to counteract this, Heath tried to sell Britain’s entry into Europe by staging an international friendly football match at Wembley in which a combined eleven from the six original EEC members took on a team from Britain, Denmark and Ireland, the bloc’s three new members. Pat Jennings, Bobby Charlton, Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer turned out for the “Three”, while Dino Zoff, Franz Beckenbauer, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens played for the “Six”. Yet the public reacted with a notable lack of interest, with only 36,000 turning up for the occasion.

Back in the Seventies, English football was far more parochial, with almost all the managers and players either English, British or Irish. Ironically, however, this was also the time of English dominance in Europe. In the 12 years between British entry into the EEC, in 1973, and the Heysel stadium disaster of 1985, after which all English teams were banned from European competition, English club sides reached the final of the European Cup nine times and won the competition seven times — including six times in a row between 1977 and 1982. For all the financial dominion of the Premier League today, and its access to the best foreign talent and managers, it has never come close to the success it knew when it was run by the Little England gammons of old.

Curiously, English football has almost entirely managed to swerve the Little Englandism stigma that has attached itself to other mass entertainments. In fact, so successfully has football adapted to the post-war growth of the educated middle class, that to be a fan today still offers the kind of everyman credibility that it did for Wilson in the Seventies, without any hint of disreputability that might come from, say, a visit to a UFC fight. Today, the Prime Minister is expected to understand and comment about football and even welcome the appointment of the new England manager.

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Just as Britain is much more middle class than it was, so too is football. Our pundits are expected to adhere to the social expectations of its fans, avoiding any hint of parochial backwardness. A host of football podcasts now describe the sophistication and quality of continental football, mocking the provincialism of pundits such as Richard Keys and Andy Gray who dominated in the Nineties before being sacked for “prehistoric banter”. Today, the pair are the highly paid frontmen of the Qatar-based BeIN Sports where they talk about the English game with what today’s generation see as similarly prehistoric views. The stain of “Little Englandism” is now as toxic in football as it is in most other aspects of middle-class life. To be critical of Thomas Tuchel’s appointment is to emit a whiff of that small-minded parochialism.

Such instincts are not new. Even George Orwell, who admired what he saw as the gentle patriotism of the English, remarked upon the “insularity” of his countrymen and their “refusal to take foreigners seriously”. Perhaps this was true in the Forties, but it’s hard to argue that today despite the reaction of some former players and pundits to Tuchel’s appointment.

There is not another football league in the world which is as global in its reach or talent as the Premier League. Where there were hardly any foreign managers in the league in the Seventies, today 80% of Premier League managers are foreign. In fact, since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, not a single English manager has guided a team to the league. Tuchel is the third foreign manager to take on the England job after Sven Goren Erikson and Fabio Capello, neither of whom did as well as Gareth Southgate.

In contrast, not one of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil or Argentina have appointed a foreign manager to take on their national team. For all the knee-jerk reaction to the Little Englander gammons who criticised the appointment of a GERMAN, English football, much like its economy, is not marked by its insularity but the opposite — its distinctive openness. While the French rule yoghurt manufacturers to be of strategic national interest unable to be bought by overseas investors, we let the French build our core energy infrastructure. The irony of the Little England charge, in other words, is that the real marker of European sophistication would be to be less open to the world — and less English.

The appointment of Thomas Tuchel, then, is not a departure in any sense, but another example of globalised England. We don’t just get the Germans to manage our football team, we have the French running our power stations, the Emirates running our ports and the Chinese buying up pretty much anything they want — provided the Americans don’t notice. George Osborne got a Canadian to run Britain’s monetary policy and wanted an American to head up the police. Perhaps we should put the premiership and Treasury out to tender too. We know what the neighbours think, they are right here. Those complaining about Little Englanders holding the country back have not been paying attention. Little England died a long time ago.

The reality is that, excepting a few enclaves, crackpot identity politics is as alien to this sceptred isle as chlorinated chicken. We’ve never had much use of such foreign imports to be rude to our compatriots. For we have our own very English system of discrimination, and it is called the class system — at times, subtly registered through the policing of accents; at others, less subtly so, as when Thatcher brought out the blowtorches to discipline the miners.

Seen in the longue durée, there was only a brief mid-century blip — Enoch Powell’s Britain — when many abandoned class-thinking and became race-mad, in no small part on account of the identity crisis provoked by the shrinking of the British Empire into the British nation. This had damaging consequences: two generations without black and brown representation in the Commons (not a single person of colour was elected between 1929 and 1987); scores of race riots and hate crimes; and a general aura of unpleasantness and violence, captured with brio in This is England.

Yet there have undeniably been some stabs at course correction in the new millennium. Race is mostly passé. Class is back. It’s a point that Tommy Robinson’s near-namesake Tomiwa Owolade made in a compelling polemic published last year, the gist of which is conveyed by its title: This is not America. These days, there isn’t much of a racial gap to speak of. In Britain, blacks earn 6% less an hour than whites (in the US, 22% less), even outliving the latter (in the US, they die four years earlier on average). The wage gap increases to 13% between Caribbean and white men, and to 42% between Bangladeshi and white men; yet Indian men make 13% more than white men. Class more convincingly accounts for these disparities than race, Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities being overwhelmingly working class. Indian and Nigerian migration, by contrast, tends to be more middle-class.

Therein lies the rub for the hammered herberts who howl “Ingerland” at far-Right rallies in SW1, appealing to a misplaced sense of racial solidarity. For no such thing exists. Their white bourgeois brethren, in fact, see them as an atavistic bunch of yahoos and yobs, primitives from another planet. Ironically, the only people likely to sympathise with their lot are their dark-skinned working-class neighbours, the very migrants they detest.

All of this Tommy Robinson learned in a hard school earlier this month, when, from his Cypriot resort, he exhorted his million followers on X to “show your support” for the “real” England, after the stabbing of three children at a dance class in Southport by an embittered Taylor Swift critic apparently called “Ali al-Shakati”, supposedly a former small-boat passenger. As it was, that the attacker was born in Cardiff to Rwandan immigrants didn’t deter the dregs that drool at the dicta of Robinson from rampaging through the Midlands and the North, torching mosques and hotels housing asylum seekers. The extent of public support for the Robinsonistas was duly revealed a week later, when racist protestors were vastly outnumbered by antiracist counter-protestors across the country. Robinson was shown his station.

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Despite their numerical insignificance, though, there’s no denying that the Robinsonistas represent a Powellite neuralgia that hasn’t entirely died out in Britain. Most Brits have moved on, seeing race as a non-issue, as relevant to the business of friendship and marriage as handedness. Yet a tiny section has clung to its empty certitudes. Suffice to say it pays to inquire into this milieu, its penchants and thought-world, which is why I laboured through Robinson’s literary productions, a dud triptych of semi-literate reflections on race relations.

The facts of his life are well-established, and covered in extenso in his first memoir, Enemy of the State, which appeared in 2016. Né Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a name that conjured up images of bespectacled hippiedom, our antihero very early on took up a rougher nom de guerre for much the same reasons, it seems, that Herr Schicklgruber preferred not to go by that handle. The original Tommy Robinson was a Luton lout, a football hooligan of some prominence in such circles. The one born in 1982 qualified as an aircraft engineer, but then derailed his career for the faux pas of kicking a police officer — intervening to prevent Robinson from attacking his missus — in the head. “For that one kick, I spent five months in jail.”

Thereafter, Robinson set up as a plumber, moonlighting as a football hooligan boss. He turned to politics in 2004, joining the BNP in response to British Muslims allegedly celebrating 9/11. Still, he first became aware of “racial trouble” at a much younger age. Aged 13, he had discerned a “growing gang mentality among the Muslim kids”. In Enemy, he paints a tenebrous picture of Luton — drugs; knives; rapes — as something of a Caracas on the Lea. This he pins exclusively down to the character of Islam, much as one would, I suppose, blame Catholicism for the curse of the Colombian drug cartels.

But he misses the elephant in the room. As the Luton-born, working-class academic Thomas Peak has recently pointed out, if Robinson’s Muslim classmates in Eighties Luton appeared less “integrated”, it was at least partly because they sought safety in numbers after hooligans destroyed their neighbourhood following a football match; the 1985 Luton riot was one of the most egregious of that decade. Despite that episode, Peak recalls a fairly post-racial youth, kids of all colours having a laugh together at the local boxing club and Luton Carnival.

Slow on the uptake, Robinson left the BNP after belatedly discovering that it was a racist outfit. His black friends — who seem to exist only to point to his own reserves of tolerance — were made to wait at the door, since membership was reserved for whites. Five years later, he established a tanning salon and the English Defence League, the latter after having recoiled in horror at Muslim protestors holding up such heretical messages as “butchers of Basra”, as if one had to be a rabid Islamist to oppose Blair’s war, which pointlessly dispatched countless Brits and Iraqi civilians to a premature grave.

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For brawling, then breaching bail conditions, Robinson was sent to prison in 2011. HMP Bedford was full of surprises. “A problem more and more these days,” he incredulously writes, “is that you just don’t know who the Muslims are. Everyone’s dressed the same, and it isn’t just Asians who are Muslims. So blacks, whites, mixed race… anyone and everyone can be a Muslim.” The converts riled him up. “This white geezer McDonald said, ‘I’m fucking Muslim bruv’. And the way he said it, well, that was it. We ended up fighting across the servery and I battered him.” Later, Robinson went on a hunger strike because — so he claims — he was being fed halal meat.

In 2013, our recidivist found himself behind bars again, this time for using a friend’s passport to circumvent a travel ban in order to attend an Islamophobic symposium in the US. Once again, in another telenovela-ish turn, he recanted, making a big show of leaving the EDL and breaking naan with Mo Ansar, the disgraced Lloyds Bank employee turned soi-disant voice of British Islam (one of those dodgy “community leaders”, whatever they are) who helped “reform” Robinson. Profiled in the Telegraph, Ansar was described thus:

“He speaks the language of tolerance and moderation, yet he refuses to condemn the chopping off of hands for theft in Islamic states or homophobia… He has creatively, and quite dramatically, sexed up his professional experience, including falsely claiming to be a lawyer… He runs a sock-puppet Twitter account which he uses to defend himself and attack perceived rivals.”

Incredibly, Robinson warmed to him — “if every Muslim was like you there would be no problem” — even if later in his memoirs, he struck a less charitable note: “Mo was very much a cartoon character, a muppet Muslim.” At all events, it seems that the clincher for leaving the EDL was an £8,000 cheque paid by the think-tank Quilliam, which in return took credit for Robinson’s deradicalisation. But the good character shtick didn’t last long. Yet another prison sentence came hard on the heels of When Tommy Met Mo — the documentary about the encounter — and Tommy wound up in jail once again, this time for mortgage fraud.

Some of the stuff in Enemy of the State is admittedly rather tame. In his criticisms of the niqab, for instance, he appears to have the making of a clubbable French Lefty: “at least the French had the courage to ban the face veil.” But time and again, his racial idée fixe rears its ugly head: the “ethnic cleansing” of Luton by brown Muslims, who apparently have an innate fondness for “grooming gangs”. The facts, of course, tell a different story. As the Home Office concluded in 2020, “group-based child sexual exploitation offenders are most commonly white”. Across Britain, race appears tells us little. But then again, nor does economic deprivation, there being wide variation in similar councils. Sometimes statistics can be illuminating, and sometimes they aren’t. This is a case of the latter.

The most crippling defect in Robinson’s oeuvre is unquestionably his ethnicisation of class, as if the “white” in “white working class” means anything, as if him and Helena Bonham Carter might just have more in common than he does with some thick-necked Muslim bruiser he once shared a cell with. There are passages where he almost gets it, as when he wryly observes that the working classes, irrespective of hue, are typically appreciated only when they dig trenches and die en masse “on the orders of the snooty and superior upper classes”. But then he veers off on a tangent, whingeing about the white working class being “racially victimised” in Britain. Even so, he’s sanguine about the prospects of a cross-class white coalition. His job, he thinks, is to convince “middle-class Englishmen and women to say enough’s enough”. But there are some real howlers in his understanding of class markers — “middle-class tweedies” are apparently “too busy catching up on the latest Sky Atlantic box set” — which makes one suspect whether he’s the right messenger for his audience.

Yet one can see why Robinson might be squeamish about using the c-word, or even “working class” for that matter, without qualifying adjectives. This is because, economically speaking, he has seceded from it. Soon after Enemy came a lucrative gig with the Canadian website Rebel Media. Practically a sinecure, he was paid £8,000 a month for his canny ability to materialise, mirage-like, camera in hand, at the opportune moment when Islamists struck Britain. All the same, he scarcely lasted a year in that job, because he was raking in far greater sums through donations to justify having a boss. These days, he’s toying with the idea of taking up Spanish residency to evade an HMRC investigation; along with two cronies — his ex-wife Jenna Vowles and Man Friday Adam Geary — Robinson owes the state something like £800,000 in unpaid taxes.

It was perhaps only natural, then, in the time-honoured tradition of the gentleman amateur, for the newly minted man of independent means to aspire to the scholarly vocation. Accordingly, Robinson donned his skull cap and set to work on his second opuscule. A departure from his autobiographical obsessions, Mohammed’s Koran, co-authored with the grooming-gang obsessive Peter McLoughlin in 2017 and bearing the lurid subtitle “Why Muslims Kill for Islam”, is a work of Koranic exegesis. But it is not a tome intended for Muslims, we are told at the outset: “If you are a Muslim, please put this book down. We do not wish you to become a killer because this book leads you to understand the doctrines and history of Islam more thoroughly.”

Pitched as a corrective to the thought-world of the “educated” elite, Mohammed’s Koran tells us that peaceful Muslims exist, to be sure, but they’ve got it all wrong. They’ve misunderstood their faith. The rest of the book is taken up with the reordering of chapters of the Koran. The game here is that old parlour game of the Muslim clerical classes: naskh, or the doctrine of abrogation, allowing for the repeal of Koranic verses contradicted by later passages to iron out inconsistencies. By rearranging the text like a clerical DJ, Robinson is able to place all the peaceful bits in the book fairly early on, and so “abrogate” them in favour of the later, violent bits. There you have it: a most vile, violent faith. It’s desperate, puerile stuff.

The exegetical turn proved short-lived. Within weeks, Robinson was back on his laptop, counselling the terrorist Darren Osborne, who went on to drive a van into a Muslim crowd in Finsbury Park, killing one and injuring 11. “I’m not justifying it,” Robinson later wrote on Twitter, adding with a touch of apophasis that “the mosque where the attack happened tonight has a long history of creating terrorists”. Two years later, in 2019, our jailbird did time yet again, for contempt of court, after which he appealed for asylum in the US on InfoWars, a website that vends conspiracy theories and dietary supplements: “I beg Donald Trump, I beg the American government, to look at my case,” he said on air. Sadly for him, this cut no ice with his ochre overlord. He had to stay content in his country pile in Greater Manchester, complete with a hot tub in the garden and a TV set above his bathtub.

A fool and his money are soon parted, however, and Robinson had to pay £100,000, plus legal costs to the tune of £1.5 million, for libelling 15-year-old refugee Jamal Hijazi, who was assaulted by far-Right thugs and forced to relocate after Robinson falsely accused him of attacking “young English girls”. Even Robinson was forced to concede that he had cancelled the kid on the strength of faulty intel: “I have been completely had, how embarrassing man.” He declared bankruptcy soon after, busying himself by stalking an Indy journalist and her partner for which he received a five-year stalking protection order, and swearing at a taxi driver in Bologna: “little paki who drives a car… I’m going to punch you in the head, kick you in the face, because I am the king of the whole Islam race [sic].”

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Like a dog that returns to its vomit, Robinson returned to the Hijazi affair in his third book, Silenced, a tedious reprisal of who said what to whom about who. Telegraphically put, a précis could read thus: “I was right. The courts were wrong.”

For all his energetic antics and massive platform – Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Today programme, Oxford Union, BBC, a Channel 4 documentary, all supplied by a guilt-ridden bien-pensant commentariat questing for earthy authenticity — it is cheering to note that only a miniscule minority of souls have fallen for Tommy Robinson’s grift. In 2019, he polled a mere 2.2% when he ran for MEP. When Gerard Batten brought him into the Brezhnevite bureaucracy of Ukip as “grooming gang advisor”, Farage and seven other MEPs promptly resigned, fearing reputational damage. These are, after all, rather different traditions: Ukip’s origins lie in a fairly conventional postwar Euroscepticism, whereas Robinson’s roots are in the interwar fascism of Oswald Mosley’s kind, now beyond the pale.

Robinson, in short, is an anachronism. There is no existential struggle between white and coloured Britain. Rather, what we have on our hands is an existential struggle between white and Muslim fundamentalists, both sides as thick as mince, and, after a fashion, two sides of the same coin. It is no accident, then, that Robinson has recently praised Muslim conservatives for being “strong in principle” and joined them in opposing the teaching of tolerance to sexual minorities in schools. “Homosexuality is a heinous horrible thing,” a conservative Muslim told the press; “it’s not acceptable in Islam.” Robinson’s response: “I stand with the Muslim parents.” A plague o’ both your houses.

While the players themselves stayed at a remote castle, the WAGs and other family members were billeted at the luxurious Brenners Park Hotel, on one side of which green screens, reminiscent of those they put around stricken horses at the Grand National, were erected so they could sunbathe on the lawns unmolested by the paparazzi. Which meant that when they did venture out, there was a feeding frenzy.

It was unlike any other tournament I’ve covered. On one morning, I went for a run along that path and was almost flattened by a photographer falling out of a tree as he strained for a shot over the screens. At the time, it seemed an entirely mundane occurrence. Every night, after hearing rumours about their location, we’d rush off to see a large group of WAGs at a club or in a bar or dancing on the table at an unsuspecting Italian restaurant, surrounded by their entourages and photographers and reporters, as the well-heeled elderly tourists who comprise much of Baden-Baden’s regular summer population watched on in bemusement. Occasionally, the players would come to visit. Rio Ferdinand pushed in front of me in the queue at a gelateria.

For those journalists fortunate enough to be staying at the Brenners Park — how long ago expense accounts like that seem now — there was a rich harvest to be reaped by hanging around the bar, listening to second-hand accounts of what the players were saying, who was slagging off whom and who was sleeping with whom. It was gossipy, bitchy, enthralling and exhausting. It was the moment when English football definitively became part of celebrity culture, and totally unsuitable for the business of winning a major football tournament. Perhaps in hindsight, even though 9/11 had happened and Iraq had been invaded, there was an air of complacency, everybody high on Germany’s Sommermärchen in the days before the Crash.

England went out in the quarter-final and Eriksson, who died yesterday aged 76, resigned soon after. By then, there was a sense of frustration, a feeling that he had not quite got the most out of a fine group of players cursed by Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, with the Golden Generation tag. It felt the off-field activities had become too big a distraction — the affairs, the endless endorsements, the Fake Sheikh sting. Certainly, Eriksson didn’t seem able to deal with the fact that the Golden Generation didn’t really make sense as a team, that one or more needed to be dropped so a less glamorous figure could offer defensive cover, a coherent midfield sacrificed on the altar of celebrity.

But there was no great sense of bitterness. Eriksson was too charming for that. His great strength had been that he didn’t ever seem that bothered by anything, that he treated triumph and defeat alike with a sigh and a drawn-out, “Welllll….” Given his predecessor as England manager Kevin Keegan had tearfully quit in the Wembley toilets after a World Cup qualifying defeat to Germany, such calmness was both welcome and invigorating. What if we treated players like adults? What if management was not about spittle-flecked sergeant-majorly bellowing but about consensus?

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Turning to a foreign manager was, effectively, an admission of defeat by England, a recognition the system had failed. Justifiable concerns about whether it was really the done thing for a major footballing nation to appoint a foreigner bled into base xenophobia. Others might have quailed before that. Eriksson shrugged. And it helped, obviously, that he got results.

Towards the end of his first year in the job, in September 2001, 10 days before 9/11, England went to Germany needing a win to have any chance of beating them to the one automatic qualifying slot. Given England had not won in Germany since 1965 and Germany had lost only one of their previous 60 World Cup qualifiers, few gave them much chance. But it was one of those hallucinatory games in which the usual rules seem not to apply. England went behind but then equalised, then took the lead, then kept on scoring, eventually winning 5-1.

Sven, as everybody by then called him, suddenly became a messianic figure who transcended football. Sales of Ericsson mobile phones went through the roof. A 10-year-old boy had his hair cut to resemble Eriksson’s. It took an injury-time David Beckham free-kick against Greece, but England did qualify for the 2002 World Cup ahead of Germany. It was, though, Germany who, having gone through the play-offs, late got through to the final, while England went out to Brazil. Had Beckham not just returned from a fractured metatarsal, might he have made a better fist of stopping the break that led to the equaliser? Perhaps, but Eriksson was never going to drop Beckham.

Yet alongside the celebrity worship, there was a willingness to embrace youth. It was Eriksson who made Wayne Rooney the youngest ever England international before Euro 2004, and until Rooney broke his own metatarsal in the quarter-final, he looked capable of dragging England to glory almost single-handed. As other major names faltered, England looked like potential winners, even if a midfield of Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes lacked width on the left, pace on the right and solidity in the middle.

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By 2006, in truth, it had all gone a little stale; the porous midfield had become a little too familiar. Eriksson was the first manager to lead England to three successive quarter-finals, but the last was by far the least impressive of them. Treating players like adults, it turned out, led to Baden-Baden. Gareth Southgate’s assessment from the Brazil defeat in 2002 seemed damning: “We needed Churchill but we got Ian Duncan Smith.” England, seeking difference, turned to an Englishman and then to a martinet, but miserable reigns of Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello only served to cast Eriksson’s stint in a rosier light.

To remember only Baden-Baden, though, is to ignore what a great manager Eriksson had been. He was only 30 when, in 1979, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. He was a revolutionary, heavily influenced by English football and, in particular, by the success of Bobby Houghton with Malmö and Roy Hodgson with Halmstad. It was one thing for English managers to come to Sweden, bin the libero and play with a zonal system, but when a Swede started doing it, it caused an outcry; to some, he may have been too Swedish for England, but he had once been too English for Sweden. One newspaper jokingly printed an advert offering the middle of Gothenburg’s pitch for rent, given Eriksson’s direct style meant it wasn’t much used during games.

But it brought two Swedish Cups and a Uefa Cup — the first European trophy ever won by a Scandinavian club — and earned him a move to Benfica, where he won three Portuguese titles and reached a European Cup final. He capped two decades of success in the club game by leading Lazio to only the second Italian league title in their history. And he did it all with a sense that life was there to be lived and that it wasn’t really worth getting too worked up about anything.

Perhaps the most emblematic story came from Didi Hamann, the German midfielder whose goal at Wembley led to Keegan’s resignation and Eriksson’s appointment. He played under Eriksson at Manchester City and recalled one morning on tour in Thailand in 2008. Everybody knew Eriksson was on his way out of the club and Hamann, considering his own future, was sitting pensively alone on a sunlounger by the hotel pool. He looked up and saw Eriksson approaching, carrying a tray on which sat two glasses of champagne. He handed one to Hamman, who asked what they were celebrating.

Eriksson touched his glass to Hamann’s. “Life, Kaiser,” he said, “Life.”

Southgate’s contract expires in December, an enlightened piece of timing that means a decision on his future, whether he will lead England into the next World Cup, does not have to be taken in the emotionally heightened circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the Euros. The sense of stability is unprecedented in English football; the contrast to what is going on in British politics unavoidable. Barring something remarkable between now and the election on 4 July, Southgate will have been manager under five different prime ministers — and he missed David Cameron by only a couple of months. Even Alf Ramsey, who spent more than a decade in the job, only got through four. 

But perhaps the inversion makes sense as politics has become increasingly footballised. As Westminster has become characterised by hyper-partisanship, leaders playing to their base with outrageous claims and demands for a change at the top as a panacea to any ill, so the England manager has become increasingly statesmanlike. 

And yet, it is precisely because of Southgate’s achievements that there is pressure, precisely because he has been there for so long that there is some impatience. If England can’t win something now, then when will they ever break the drought that has endured since 1966? Since the 2018 World Cup, the narrative has shifted: Southgate is no longer the waistcoated magus, conjuring remarkable performances from an unexceptional squad; he is the dull bureaucrat holding back a generation of unprecedented creative talent. Perhaps a Keir Starmer parallel is a stretch, but sometimes the country just needs a refreshing dose of dullness.

The boring truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Southgate’s three unexceptional years in charge of Middlesbrough — which ended in relegation — would never have been enough to have made him a serious candidate for the England job in normal times. But in the context of Sam Allardyce having been forced out just 69 days after his arrival by the Telegraph’s underwhelming sting — which revealed nothing more than his willingness to accept huge sums of money to give speeches overseas and to offer advice to agents seeking to comply with the Premier League’s third-party contract regulations — England just needed somebody available and uncontroversial.

Southgate had been England’s Under-21 manager and was working with the FA on its various development programmes — making him at least partially responsible for the glut of attacking talent he is now supposedly restricting. He never sought the top job, rather it was thrust upon him. As he led England through qualification and then to the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup, there was a sense of him as a Richard Hannay figure, an accidental hero. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the Brexit negotiations, Southgate seemed an old-fashioned English hero, modest and decent in his waistcoat, his strength nothing flashy or extravagant but a quiet determination, backed up by dogged research. 

For the first time at a World Cup, England won a penalty shoot-out, the result of diligent practice and work with psychologists. Set-plays became a major weapon: again, something planned, but an unglamorous way of winning. The country was gripped by a strange euphoria. England had been dismal in every tournament since Euro 2004; this was the unleashing of a great pent-up patriotic wave.

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Tournaments are deceptive spaces, their place in the popular consciousness far more down to their vibe than any actual detail. In the aftermath of their elimination by Iceland at Euro 2016 under Roy Hodgson and then his successor’s rapid departure after being caught on camera apparently drinking a pint of wine (Allardyce was obviously drinking water, but reputation sometimes skews the perspective), England were a laughing stock and so to reach the semi-final was a remarkable achievement.

But England did lose as many games as they had won in that tournament and the draw had been very kind. There was also a sense that the semi-final against Croatia represented an opportunity missed. England had gone 1-0 up and then had apparently frozen with the line in sight. Southgate had responded slowly to Croatia taking control of midfield. Both issues would be raised again at Euro 2020.

That competition really was a golden chance squandered. Again the draw was relatively gentle — even offering up a fading Germany for a cathartic 2-0 win. The tournament was spread across Europe but, because of differing Covid regulations, England ended up playing six of their seven games at Wembley. In the final against Italy, they went 1-0 up. But again England froze as their fingers closed on the prize and again Southgate was slow to react. 

Even then, they might have won on penalties. Southgate was meticulous. He had done more work on penalties than any previous England manager. He had ended the hoodoo. If Marcus Rashford’s penalty had gone three inches to the right, England would probably have won. But it hit the post and bounced to safety, then Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed. England had fumbled the opportunity again. 

This time, there was far less sympathy. This time, as the three players who had missed were subjected to racist abuse on social media, there was a reckoning, less of Southgate than of fan behaviour at the final. A day of heavy drinking, cocaine openly consumed on the street and a fan sticking a flare up his arse culminated in a surge on Wembley and several hundred fans getting in without tickets, and fighting on the concourses. The glee of 2018 had curdled.

Southgate had begun to lose support on the political Right because of his support of players taking the knee. Then, at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, he lost support from the Left because of his reluctance to be overly critical of the host nation.

But perhaps what is most striking is how calm he has remained discussing such subjects. He has never attacked the questioner, never sneered, never become flustered. He’s always been quite willing to discuss wider issues, when it would be very easy for him to insist that he’s just a football man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognise a value in his tone, to wonder whether life mightn’t be better if more press conferences were conducted with similar consideration, thoughtfulness and graciousness.

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In terms of the football, England played well in Qatar. They were more expansive than they had been at the Euros, seemingly more confident in their creative abilities. They lost in the quarter-final but in a close game against France that could have gone either way. Maguire headed against the post at one end then Olivier Giroud’s effort at the other flicked his head and flashed in. Harry Kane missed a penalty. Another referee might have decided Saka was fouled in the build-up to France’s opener. 

Perhaps Kane’s miss from the spot eight minutes from time was a result of anxiety but this was a different quality of exit; there was no real sense of a chance wasted, just two good teams going at each other and the margins favouring France. To an extent, it was a measure of how far Southgate had brought the side that England went into a game against the reigning world champions as their near equals. And yet, the nagging thought remained that England always lose when they face good sides; it’s a thought that is not entirely explained by the fact that few teams look particularly good once you’ve beaten them.

And so Southgate goes again, into a fourth tournament. There is real expectation. Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy, possibly the Netherlands and Belgium all look dangerous, but England and France have the best squads. Southgate’s selection has prompted talk of his ruthlessness in leaving out Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, James Maddison and Jack Grelaish, as though this was a new decisiveness.

The truth is he has always been ruthless, as Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney discovered when they were left out of the squad for Russia in 2018. Southgate has always been his own man, ignoring the clamour for certain players and claims he is over-loyal, never afraid to dispose of a player if necessary; it’s just that his air of reasonableness means it often goes unnoticed. He said very early on in his reign that he wanted to stand or fall on his own terms and to that ideal he has remained true.

He has been an excellent England manager, the best since Alf Ramsey, who also battled constant accusations of overcaution. If he could only react quicker to in-game problems and get his players to lose their fear of success, he might actually win something.

This uniquely English parochial cosmopolitanism courses through the recent, flourishing discourse on political Englishness. As the Economist’s Duncan Robinson has correctly observed, English nationalism is the dog that refuses to bark: there are no meaningful popular campaigns for an English parliament, secession from the UK is a position of the extreme fringe, and even Boris Johnson’s scrapping of the modest constitutional reform of English Votes for English Laws was met with mass apathy. If the English are, as Chesterton claimed, “the secret people… that never have spoken yet”, it can only be assumed that that is because they prefer silence.

And yet, as a consequence of devolution, there has been an explosion in recent years of political commentary on that mythical dragon, English nationalism. What is perhaps most remarkable is that this discourse is entirely driven by the Left: in so far as English nationalism exists in Britain it is a product of centre-left think-tank panels in Westminster. As nationalisms go, it is thin gruel, but then it’s explicitly meant to be. For what is most striking about this SW1-endorsed Englishness is how it is inevitably framed in terms of “reclaiming Englishness from the radical Right”, despite the fact such a thing does not meaningfully exist in England and shows no appreciable sign of coming into being.

English nationalism, indeed, often appears like a culture-bound syndrome of Celtic nationalists, a foil for them to rage against, or a danger to be guarded from, even as England continues on its course with amiable indifference. Bearers of strong ethnic identities themselves, Celtic nationalists perceive their equivalent potential in England, even if the English themselves prefer not to. From the Ukania hypothesis of British dysfunction and disintegration put forward by the Scottish nationalist Tom Nairn and Anglo-Irish grandee Perry Anderson, to the musings of the recently-deceased Labour MP-turned-Welsh-nationalist David Marquand, England is a problem to be urgently solved, by granting the English a sensible, Scandinavian-style social democracy before the English belatedly adopt something harder-edged for themselves.

It is explicitly within this vein of thought that the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has published her new book, Another England, written to fend off the risk that “politicians and others… will use this latent tension for their own ends, stirring up emotions, provoking confrontations, and hoping to ride the same kind of nativist rage that took Donald Trump to the White House”. There is much to admire in Lucas’ book: her love of England’s natural beauty, so poorly served by Conservatives who profess guardianship of the land; her appreciation of the genuine diversity of dialect, vernacular architecture and sentiment packed into such a small area; her sensitive reading of English Literature, drawing on her PhD research. Many of her suggestions — for an English Parliament, civic autonomy, a land value tax, nationalisation of common goods, and expansion of the right to roam — are sensible and good: all are sentiments that are, in their way, fundamentally conservative, at least when compared to the radical liberalism of the Conservative Party. 

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Yet the remarkable thing about her book — perhaps the most English thing about it — is its squeamishness in framing Englishness as a national identity like other national identities, the cultural heritage of a specific people in a specific place over historical time: just like the Japanese, or the Palestinians, or the Kurds (whose lack of national self-determination in their ancient homeland Lucas takes the time to lament). Remarkably, hers is a book about fending off English ethnonationalism in which her object of inquiry, the English as an ethnic group, does not appear. 

The reasoning is swiftly apparent. She opens with a lament over Brexit having cut our island off from European politics — but though she alludes once to Europe’s rising wave of Right-wing populism, she strenuously avoids addressing the cause. But look at our closest, most impeccably liberal and social-democratic European neighbours: in Germany, the most popular party among the young is the AfD; in Denmark, the Social Democratic government aims for “Net Zero Migration”; in Sweden, the radical Right is buoyant, and in the Netherlands it is the largest political force. Even Ireland, now that it is belatedly undergoing a parallel demographic transformation to the UK, seems to be developing a significantly more volatile reaction (to the discomfort of Irish liberals, who have begun claiming that Irish populism is somehow a British plot).

If anything is remarkable about England, however, it is the near-total absence of such a political current. This is despite the fact that England, far more than Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, is currently undergoing the greatest wave of demographic change since the historic folk migration that carved an England out of Brythonic-speaking Britain in the first place. Lucas herself is relaxed about such a historic shift, even as she observes the academic consensus, like Europe’s observable political reality, is towards it driving political disorder. “On current trends,” she notes, “the white British will become a minority (though still by far the largest minority) at some point in the 2070s… and academic thinking has come from different directions — demography, politics, sociology — to identify this phenomenon as a decisive driver in political populism. But it doesn’t have to be.” 

Yet anyone anticipating a groundbreaking rebuttal of the social-scientific literature finds only the assertion that: “For one thing, we can be confident that a more diverse population is a strength.” In any case, she reassures us, “I won’t be around in the 2070s to see an England where… [future generations] do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear”. It must be said that the English have taken to such a historically transformative, high-stakes experiment with a rare degree of equanimity. 

Whether or not she is correct, Lucas’s serene detachment is, ironically enough, an unreflexive example of the English Exceptionalism she lays at the door of the Eton and Oxford rotters at the top. Other less enlightened nations may turn to angry reaction as an inevitable result, but such things simply aren’t British… sorry, English. And perhaps she’s right: England really does appear to be an outlier, certainly within Europe. While the majority, in increasing numbers, believe migration, especially under the Conservatives, has been too high — even Lucas states that “in the short to medium term at least, some rules on immigration are also necessary” — there is admirably little hostility to migrants themselves. There are, after all, few if any other nations so solicitous of minorities as to wish to become one: perhaps the English really are the most liberal and tolerant nation on earth. 

Even still, it is impossible to read this book without sensing Lucas recapitulating all the outward-looking, world-beating, boosterish exceptionalism she mocks in the British ruling class, and squeezing it into England’s smaller container. In a book ostensibly aimed at carving out an English political imagination from the constraints of the British state, she spends a chapter lamenting the British Empire, including for its “essentially racist notion that the ‘white man’ had a moral duty to care for… ‘less fortunate peoples’” (no doubt this is different to her own desire to host the less affluent of the Earth). Brexit itself, and the ongoing culture wars over the past, Lucas reads as a top-down displacement activity launched by Westminster elites to stifle progressive change — rather than, as the academic literature predicts, a displacement proxy conflict fought by the dwindling ethnic majority against demographic change, no different to Ulster Protestant fears over the Irish language and Irish Republican symbolism. 

Like the English themselves, the very reason she is writing this book in the first place can only be addressed obliquely, like some malign folk spirit whose naming grants it power. Even as the liberal order is shaken by ethnic conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine, today’s liberals cannot bring themselves, as their predecessors in the Nineties were able to, to address their long-described dynamics frankly, retreating to their comfort zones of Americanised race discourse and elite-driven conspiracies.

It is fascinating, then, that the precipitating factor for Lucas’s call for Englishness is her sympathy for the separatist Celtic nationalisms, which she understands as perfectly natural historical developments. Though she does not address this point, these are of course ethnic nationalisms: the Scottish and Welsh and Irish are nations by virtue not just of their inherent “cultural stuff” (in the anthropologist Fredrik Barth’s phrase), but of the amicable but real ethnic boundaries demarcating the Welsh and Scottish from the English, and the Irish from the British peoples. It is not, after all, through racism that Welsh nationalists resent English homeowners moving into their country or weakening the vitality of their language, but ethnic consciousness and fear of the cultural change English migration brings. 

The fact that these ethnic boundaries are permeable — that Gerry Adams possesses a solidly English surname, and Arlene Foster was born with a good native Irish one — does not mean they do not exist. When, in Lucas’s telling, the Welsh and Scots set off in pursuit of their historical destiny by leaving the United Kingdom, and the Northern Irish (due to shifts in political power wrought by demographic change, though Lucas does not address this dynamic) join the Republic, then the English will find themselves, like the Austrians and Russians before them, heirs to a shrunken state, and at risk of all manner of unprogressive political malignities. It is the work of Westminster liberals, in this reading, to shape political Englishness before the English find it thrust upon them, and Nigel Farage finds his inner Atatürk. Whether the proportional representation Lucas advocates would neuter such an eventuality, as she imagines, or accelerate it, as European politics suggests, remains unclear.

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But the assumption, made by Celtic nationalists as well as the English liberal Left, that the English are inherently prone to an aggressively exclusionary ethnic nationalism, which requires constant diverting in a healthily multicultural direction, is so far not borne out by the evidence. When Scotland and Wales, which possess the homogeneous demographics of mid-20th century England, reach the same stage — if they ever do — their nationalist critiques of English intolerance may be worth listening to. As we have seen, it is the precise contrary that is most remarkable, a situation that is poorly explained other than by that unfashionable thing, national temperament. Perhaps that will change, perhaps not: one way or another we will find out, even if Lucas won’t. 

As the writer Paul Kingsnorth (who Lucas incidentally cites in her acknowledgements, without engaging with intellectually) remarked in his own St George’s Day missive, perhaps England’s new non-English majority will choose to become English over time, as immigrant Irish and Jews did before them; or perhaps “England is simply coming to an end, as all nations ultimately do.” But for now, the English seem uniquely happy, or resigned, or apathetic about merging their nation into a new and determinedly bloodless civic identity, a European Canada or Australia. 

In waiting for the English to begin to hate, England’s powerless radical Right, like its dominant equivalents on the liberal Left, have been left waiting a very long time. Here is the irony of Lucas’s position: lamenting an English exceptionalism her worldview depends upon, and yearning for political unity with a Europe whose politics she detests. Perhaps Westminster politicians like Lucas, so keen to ward off the dark potential of English ethnonationalism, can cut the English nation a little slack: if the fearful dragon ever existed, it seems to have died long before our time.

In 1986, a year before The Last of England was released, Jarman purchased a home by the sea. Prospect Cottage is a small wooden house clinging to the shingle ribbon at Dungeness. The walls are black, the door and window frames gorse yellow. An excerpt from John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is picked out on one wall: “Sawcy Pedantique wretch, goe chide / late schoole boyes and sore prentices…” Today the cottage has become something of a meme. Its neat proportions and stark location do well on Instagram, and you can buy a Prospect Cottage model kit for the aspiring hermit in your life. Jarman, always suspicious of the heritage industry, would laugh.

Dungeness is a place for fishermen and ascetics. Stone, sky, sea. The place is bound by water, with the English Channel to one side and the flat weirdness of Romney Marsh to the other. Dungeness is England stripped naked. Everything is on show. The little cottages crouch in the lee of a defunct nuclear power station and the horizon is swagged with power lines. Migrants arrive in rubber dinghies every summer now. What do they make of it? Relics of industry, toy houses, the click and shift of shingle beneath their feet. Is this what they expected?

The Last of England was a response to the paint-by-numbers neoliberalism of Britain in the late Eighties. It was also the record of a personal apocalypse. Jarman was dying from Aids and so were most of his friends. He feared that England’s memory was being wiped, just as the collective memory of his own generation was erased by death. And what was left? Cold hearths and dead oaks. Some scenes, in which balaclava-clad men brutalise emaciated prisoners, could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads with ease. The departure of the household gods is not an end, but a chilling new start.

A different man might have retreated to postcard England. A Cotswolds bolthole, perhaps, all buttery stone and Britain in Bloom awards. Instead he chose Dungeness. The bleak landscape pulled at him, as did the austere charm of Prospect Cottage. Although he still spent time in London, the city had become a degraded husk. Hampstead Heath seems to have been the only place in London he enjoyed, largely for its Arcadian atmosphere after dark. The rest of the capital was a drab blend of drunks and traffic.

The southern countryside wasn’t much better: “Poor ruined Kent with its ugly commuter towns, there every field and hedgerow is under siege.” Dungeness was different. While the busy-bodies had arrived — Jarman mourned the appearance of unnecessary fences and the replacement of the red phone box with a modern glass version — the place retained its essential character. Like Hampstead Heath, Dungeness had texture. It was still England.

Dungeness seems to have fed his growing apocalypticism. It is a provisional place. Jarman would have been amused by the recent discovery of a Tudor ship’s hull 300 meters inland, evidence of the coastline’s shifting nature. Between 1989-1990, Jarman worked on the journal later published as Modern Nature. The book is full of change and decay. It’s a record of loss in real time. In one passage, he delivers an elegy that would have been familiar to any Anglo-Saxon: “Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings; the wine-halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.”

There’s something off about Dungeness. He learns that the drinking water is suffused with lead and aluminium. The death of a grass-snake is an omen. Military exercises wake him in the middle of the night. The nuclear power station is “a 20th century Babylon”, its interior a “shambles of rusting pipe and escaping steam, with little men running hither and thither with spanners and screwdrivers”. Jarman noted that rising sea levels would swamp Dungeness within 100 years. He pictured the power station being washed away in a Ballardian rush.

This strange place has much in common with the world depicted in The Last of England. The film is titled after a painting by Ford Madox Brown. It depicts an emigrating couple taking one last look at England from the deck of a ship. Their gaze is fixed on coastline that we cannot see; perhaps Jarman imagined them watching Dungeness sink into the haze.

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The Ness is blasted and surreal, a settlement cobbled together in the backwash of a great disaster, just as the film is cobbled together from images of despair and anarchy. In one sequence, Jarman filmed Tilda Swinton on the strand. She moans and twirls next to a pyre while the power station sits black behind her. This was the country that he wanted to capture. Not the hay wains and stately homes, but what would be left when England finally lost her memory. A land of cruelty, fire, and Little Chef franchises.

And yet things aren’t quite so neat. The film contradicts itself. In recording England’s mythological drain, it creates symbols that project great mythic force; the cadaver leaps up halfway through the autopsy. The final scene, where robed figures paddle a boat out into a torchlit sea, rocked by waves and the grain of Super 8 film, can be read as weary retreat or bold foundation myth. Even at his most despairing, Jarman was an accidental optimist.

The way he lived at Prospect Cottage also smacks of optimism. Pessimists plant nothing, and Jarman was a great plantsman. Gardens are ephemeral, and so the perfect medium for a place like Dungeness. This was no mean feat on dry shingle bleached by wind and salt. The plants were hardy and low: sempervivum, fennel, santolina, sea kale, rosemary, iris, some hopeful roses. Jarman constructed miniature stone circles and driftwood dolmens, turning the shingle desert into a 20th century Seahenge. These sculptures looked good ­— the shoreline is dominated by horizontals, you need some punchy verticals to frame the view — but there was far more to them than that. Jarman knelt on the ground and sculpted ancient forms as England withered behind him. Perhaps he was trying to tempt the household gods home.

Jarman died 30 years ago. Although his personal apocalypse came to pass, England staggers on for now. The Last of England is a powerful account of a nation’s spiritual decay, but the worst consequences are confined to celluloid — the men in balaclavas aren’t in charge just yet. Prospect Cottage and its garden were lovingly tended by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, until 2018. Their little scrap of shingle has been recorded in two handsome volumes and is well worth a visit, if only as a reminder that if you want England back, all you have to do is re-make it.

While Blur may be doing better in their home country — they sold out Wembley last year — to most of my generation, they are essentially a sad nostalgia act. Rarely have a band’s glory days been so inseparably tied to such a derided historical moment: the “Britpop” movement and its demographic derivative “Britpopper” now represent an abyss of cringe. 

For Britpop was co-opted by that generation of British late-boomers who parlayed the end of history, their demographic glut and unique economic fortune into a series of foolhardy political conceits. Long before he invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, Tony Blair was having meetings with Damon Albarn in the Palace of Westminster. Soon enough the former lead singer of Ugly Rumours was saying things like: “Rock’n’roll is not just an important part of our culture, it’s an important part of our way of life”. Unfortunately, the heady cultural and intellectual optimism of that period can’t be seen as anything but complacency now.

As we see it, this lot valorised the liberalism that bore fruits for them, and sat on their hands as it rotted away. They fashioned a social-democratic aesthetic, and then forgot to build the social democracy. And they are consequently held responsible for a grab-bag of important and trivial mis-steps: New Labour, the Iraq War, the Olympic opening ceremony, the People’s Vote campaign and The Rest is Politics. This folk history of the Nineties does have a seductive simplicity, useful for young gadflies on Left and Right to caricature the decade, a way of chronologically tethering their competing attacks on Blairism. And it’s helped along by the fact that politics and culture did seem to align in that moment.

And yet, while Britpop certainly was gleeful at the prospect of political change, it also knew full well the problems it was running away from. Blur’s Parklife in particular, which celebrates its 30th birthday today and which was inescapable in that summer of 1994, is striking for how much of the Nineties mood it managed to get right at the time. Rather than a straightforward celebration, it sounds, now, like a melancholic critique of the period to which it also served as soundtrack, a record of the atomisation and anxiety that had already begun to seep into society. 

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Its reputation for care-free Cockney smugness is a product of the popularity of its title track — and Blur did occasionally over-indulge the musical style which Gallagher brothers called “Chas & Dave chimney sweep music”. But the rest of the tracks conjure a completely different mood: “Badhead”, “To the End”, “This is a Low” and “End of a Century”… So much of Albarn’s song-writing was drawing from a well of existential despair, his lonely characters drinking too much and cycling through American TV channels, stuck in apathetic or crumbling relationships. Already he was diagnosing the boredom and stasis we sometimes think particular to 21st-century life. And it is telling that he suffered from crippling panic attacks in the weeks immediately after Parklife’s release, bowled over by the force of getting everything he’d always wanted.

But these tracks are overshadowed by a grander project: Parklife’s nauseous portrait of modern life, a social diagnosis that Albarn and his cheerleaders went as far as to label a “manifesto” for modern England. Interviews from the time reveal his narrative of the recent past to be full of decline and decay. Post-Thatcher, “a whole new culture developed and old England died away… The American shopping malls landed in England, first in Essex. It was just awful to look at, like a spreading cancer…” And his songs are the stories of “​​characters living in this environment” and yearning to escape it — like Tracy Jacks, the civil servant who dreams of streaking on Walton Beach. Albarn called it “music for whistling in the dark”.  

The influence of Martin Amis’s London Fields has often been noted — not least by Albarn himself, who at the time painted himself as something of a Lad-lit troubadour. And he certainly inherits Amis’s scathing condescension, and his propensity for turning flesh and blood into a comedy cartoon. The album’s biggest hit, “Girls & Boys”, was written after a holiday to Magaluf, during which Albarn witnessed the emergence of Houellebecqian sexual scene, which clearly perturbed even if it did not offend. “There’s a very strong sexuality about it. I just love the whole idea of it, to be honest. I love herds. All these blokes and all these girls meeting at the watering hole and then just… copulating. There’s no morality involved, I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t happen. My mind’s just getting more dirty.”

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Albarn’s exact class relationship to this milieu was fiercely contested, especially by more true-born working-class peers. Initially, he had talked up Parklife as a concept album — “the travels of the mystical lager-eater”, a spin on Amis’s cast of low-life flaneurs. And at various stages the album was to be titled London, Sport or Soft Porn. But, soon after release, Albarn seemed determined to actually become such a figure. He held the album’s launch party at Walthamstow Dog Track (“you get the ooze of life there”, he said). And he was soon saying things like, “I started out reading Nabokov and now I’m into football, dog-racing and Essex girls,” as comfortable in an East End boozer as he was in the student union. The reality was that Albarn was always a lower-middle bohemian, not a working-class hero. He was accompanied on his fact-finding trips to Magaluf by his St Paul’s alumna girlfriend, Justine Frischmann. And his life in Essex was characterised not by dog-racing but by art school and the kind of cultured, post-Sixties homestead where he called his parents by their first names.

These contradictions of Albarn’s perspective — that of the mordant satirist-voyeur and the enthusiastic participant — do work in his favour. They lend his songs a scope that allow him to capture both ends of the Nineties. This reaches a climax on Parklife’s masterpiece, “This is a Low”. Framed through a cycle of lyrics based around Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast, the song is something of a mournful state-of-the-nation ballad. But its background account of a forgotten traveller on some twilit homeward journey (“Hit traffic on the Dogger bank/Up the Thames to find a taxi rank”) lend it a more wretched and introspective mood.

This isn’t triumphant Cool Britannia. It’s about as far from “Things Can Only Get Better”, or indeed Coachella bubble-gum, as you’re going to get, not least because it predates Britpop’s co-option by an expedient Labour Party and greedy A&R. But if we can accept that Albarn was capable of seeing behind the Nineties’ veil, perhaps we can also begin to reinterpret my generation’s received narrative of the decade. 

Rather than a last party busted by Columbine or September 11, for some the Nineties was the decade that parts of popular culture became aware of the sheer flatness of life after the great political battles of the Eighties. Part of this related to globalisation — and the music hall carry-on of Blur’s aesthetic universe was a conscious rebuttal of the creeping Americanisation they observed around them. But it also related to a distinct historical moment in Britain itself. 

Like Blair, Britpop had an ambiguous relationship with the Thatcher era that preceded it. Its subject matter — its commodity — was Thatcherism’s devastation. From their own corner of the wasteland, Blur, Pulp and Suede wrote about what they saw: lonely suburbs, remorseless yuppies and small-town drug abuse. Oasis, the most musically populist of the Britpop elite, admittedly traded in the headless euphoria of escape and renewal. But this only resonated because it was a dream, a dole-queue fantasy, that so many others could recognise. And yet, Britpop was ultimately to be consumed by the very forces that set it in motion. The first truly commercialised indie scene, they pursued popularity and market share without shame, allowing punk-ish taboos about “selling out” slide. “We were all Thatcher’s children, who got off our arses and did it for ourselves,” says Noel Gallagher, sounding every inch the barrow boy who “got on his bike”. 

Perhaps that’s why the Nineties generation is so easy to resent. They bore witness to the arrival of the society that we still live in, but were either powerless to change it, or more than happy to swim with the tide. The music, though, stands as testament to the fact that the contradictions of the decade were being registered on some level. The Britpoppers may have quickly become consumed by illusions of the new millennium, some of them embarrassingly to this day. But that doesn’t change the fact that some of them also gave voice to a world that had lost something — something which is still missing now. 

“Pray, charge your glasses, gentlemen
And drink to Harrow’s honour!
May fortune still attend the Hill
And glory rest upon her!
The world outside is wondrous wide
But here the world is narrow
One magic thrall unites us all:
The name and fame of HARROW.”

By the time I first heard those words I could already see that the “name and fame” of the school concealed a grimmer reality. Its boarding houses, in which 60 or 70 boys lived away from their parents with barely any adult supervision, seemed to me cauldrons of dysfunction. At the state comprehensives I’d attended before going to Harrow on a scholarship, its rigidly hierarchical culture — in which older boys were allowed to discipline (or, in practice, simply bully) younger boys — would have been unimaginable. Few ever sought official protection against their tormentors, either because they accepted their predicament as normal or feared the consequences of being branded a “grass”. In one case during my time at Harrow, a group of boys in my boarding house dared to report a particularly vicious senior pupil for acts of appalling abuse. Rather than involving the police, the school — possibly mindful of press attention — simply expelled him, leaving him free to find victims elsewhere.

And yet, if at 16 I had been capable of absolute self-honesty, I would have admitted to myself an awkward fact: that whenever I heard “Stet Fortuna Domus”, with its rousing tune like the anthem of a Right-wing military junta, a part of me felt precisely the “magic thrall” it invoked. I may have decided, shortly after arriving at Harrow, that I was a socialist who’d like nothing better than to see the whole place burn down. But when I considered that every day I walked the same cobbled pavestones as Byron, Churchill, Peel and Palmerston, I couldn’t quite suppress a throb of pride.

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But then, one of the remarkable things about schools like Harrow is their ability to command the loyalty of students they make thoroughly miserable. Just ask Charles Spencer, whose new memoir A Very Private School details the chilling physical and sexual abuse he endured at an exclusive “prep” school called Maidwell in the Seventies. Spencer portrays Maidwell — overseen by a cane-wielding headmaster and staffed by a sinister crew of paedophiles and predators — as akin to something from the darkest tales of that other graduate of boarding school trauma, Roald Dahl. When Spencer says that he and his contemporaries were scarred for life, it’s not just a metaphor: one of them, he reports, can still see the wounds from his headmaster’s cane on his 50-something-year-old backside.

However, perhaps the most startling line in the book comes in the epilogue where — having spent 270 pages detailing his memories of flogging, sexual assault and other “unfathomable sadistic rituals” — Spencer admits that when Maidwell opened a co-ed pre-school in the early Nineties, he promptly enrolled his daughters there. True, this was before he had an “epiphany” about how his school experiences had affected him and decided to emigrate with his children to “spare [them] a classically English upbringing”. Still, it may seem puzzling that it took entering therapy for Spencer to see just how deeply his time at Maidwell had damaged him.

Then again, the 9th Earl Spencer was merely continuing a centuries-long English custom whereby members of the ruling class suffer bitterly through their education only later to expose their own children to similar experiences. He can trace his own lineage of “forced abandonment” all the way back to 1716, when an eight-year-old John Spencer was sent away to Eton. “These psychologically hobbled victims would invariably perpetuate the madness,” writes Spencer of his ancestors, “sending them to the same schools they had hated in their time.”

What can explain this endless recycling of generational trauma? A clue may lie in psychological studies of “hazing” rituals in US campus fraternities, which have shown that the more upsetting and degrading they are, the more group loyalty they inspire. Victims are forced to rationalise their experience as meaningful trials imposed by a benevolent community. In the context of English boarding schools such cognitive dissonance can become a powerful catalyst for class solidarity.

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This may help explain why, even after what he survived, Spencer flirts with the notion that it is not the practice of sending children away from home to sink or swim at boarding school that is damaging, but certain badly run institutions. The culture of bullying I witnessed at Harrow in the early 2000s belies his breezy claim that the system “evolved significantly” after he left. Even George Orwell, who nobody can lightly call naïve, ended his classic account of boarding school horror — written some 30 years before Spencer went to Maidwell — by claiming that “the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane”. Both Spencer and Orwell succumb to a comforting thought: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to?

And of course, since your childhood defines your sense of what’s normal, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see clearly how it may have (to quote a certain poet) fucked you up — particularly if virtually everyone else in your social world had the same experience. Neither your own upbringing nor your child’s is an experiment that can be run twice. And if there are negative outcomes, who’s to say they wouldn’t have occurred in different circumstances? If they had gone to a different school, would the boys who were abused in my boarding house have suffered the ordeal they did? Would the boy from my year who, in a tragic case that became national news, picked up a knife during a psychotic episode still be in Broadmoor, and would the teacher’s daughter he attacked with it be dead?

I’m not aware of any similar stories concerning my former peers at Cedars Upper School in Leighton Buzzard, who by comparison to the boys at Harrow struck me as paragons of mental wellbeing. But neither did any of them go on to become a prime minister or canonised poet, or to achieve the kind of distinction (if that is the word) enjoyed by more recent Old Harrovians like disgraced financier Crispin Odey or culture wars influencer Laurence Fox.

And this points to the simplest reason for the perpetuation of a system that, generation after English generation, has succeeded in producing one emotionally stunted winner after another: by some very obvious measures, it works. Some psychiatrists have come to speak of “boarding-school syndrome”, but none seems to have considered that the problems with intimacy and vulnerability it involves are symptoms not of the system’s failure but of its success. The traumatic lesson taught by these schools — that the world is divided into the strong who dominate and the weak who are dominated — is part of the syllabus.

One individual who came to feel nostalgic for school days he once hated was Winston Churchill, who during the Blitz in 1940 returned to Harrow, where the boys eulogised him with a specially composed verse of “Stet Fortuna Domus”:

“Nor less we praise in sterner days
The leader of our nation
And CHURCHILL’s name shall win acclaim
In each new generation
For in your fight to guard the Right
Your country you defend, Sir
Here grim and gay we mean to stay
And stick it to the end, Sir!”

I admit I am still moved by the story that, with the Luftwaffe circling overhead, the war leader wiped away a tear at those words. And I have always been impressed that, in a wonderfully Churchillian touch, the prime minister himself asked to amend the first line from “darker” to “sterner days”. What I didn’t notice until I looked up the words to quote them was the double meaning in that capitalised “Right”. It seems to me now that in these lines you can find the whole essence of the system Harrow belongs to. It’s all there: the stern spirit that impelled Churchill to stand firm against Hitler, and that has helped countless boarding school boys stick out their smaller ordeals; the identification of a new generation’s elite with the greatness of the past; and the elision of the school, the country, the “right” and the “Right”. Stet fortuna domus, indeed.

Harrovians still sing those words at the event that has been rechristened for Churchill every year, just as we did 20 years ago, and just as I have no doubt they will to the last syllable of recorded time. But can conditions in these schools possibly be as awful as they were in my day, or in Charles Spencer’s, or George Orwell’s? When, 40 years on, today’s pupils write their memoirs of boarding school, will they too reveal the scars the system imprinted on them? A part of me struggles to believe it. I am told that the top British private schools — booming, despite Labour’s plans to tax them, as the scions of a new global elite queue up to fill their places — now abhor bullying, competing with each other to recruit full-time counselling staff. Perhaps this makes sense: tomorrow’s ruling class will presumably need to wield power with a softer touch than those who ran the British Empire. And in any case: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to. Can they?

Local elections are traditionally an opportunity for upset, rebellion and protest. And in May, when the voters of Conservative metroland (from Tunbridge Wells and Tandridge, to Nuneaton and Bedworth) go the polls, the Greens will be hoping to repeat the gains of last year, when they established pluralities and majorities in the councils of Mid-Suffolk, East Suffolk, Babergh and the Forest of Dean. Of course, this was amid a general wave of anti-Conservative feeling. But these results were distinct. The Green Party, once the preserve of the bohemian bourgeoisie, holed up in university enclaves such as Brighton and Bristol, has managed a startling prison break, vaulting fences and stiles to advance across the fields of Tory England.

Whether these victories stick is an open question. But safe seats are only safe until they aren’t, and the last time dozens of Tory strongholds swung, in 1997, they never returned to the Conservative fold. There have been numerous theories to explain this metamorphosis: Nimbyism, short-lived protest voting, disaffection at the cost-of-living crisis, strategic localism, and a genuine slippage from Conservative conservationism to Green ecologism. But, while the Greens have recently been associated with a younger urban electorate concerned about housing, social liberalism and technological acceleration towards net-zero, the party always contained a “small is beautiful”, Little England wing. An older block that prioritises “green space”, local control, local public transport and responsive administration.

To understand the true colours of this countryside revolt, I head out to Mid-Suffolk, the first local authority the Greens have ever governed by majority control. Arriving in the market town of Stowmarket, I am greeted at the station by three of the district’s Green councillors, Teresa Davis, Colin Lay and James Patchett. In their chinos, desert boots, tattersall shirts and gilets, none stands out as a typical Green. All are former Conservatives with backgrounds in the military, farming, and charities: the lieutenants of Suffolk’s Burkean platoons. They show me around Stowmarket, from the Union Jacks adorning the Victorian high street, to the large and prosperous new estates patched onto its exterior. This was a bedrock of Conservative support in 2019. And nothing about the town speaks to a Green Party positioning itself towards an exodus of disgruntled millennial Corbynites from Labour, as some have suggested. Patchett admits that: “We’re almost the opposite [of young and professional]. If you look at the people who are in the local Green Party, who come to the meetings, well… we, in our forties, are the young ones.”

Stowmarket, still the centre for Suffolk farming communities in the outlying areas, is now also something of a dormitory town, with trains running to London in just over an hour. On the outskirts of the town lies the Orwellian-sounding “Gateway 14”, a vast freeport made up of huge distribution and logistics warehouses, the product of the Conservative’s attempts at a national industrial policy and “levelling up” in the area. Many residents grumble about the development, occasionally caveating with the need for “jobs for the young”. And this isn’t the only controversial infrastructure project in the region: Green Party support has also surged in East Suffolk, where Government plans to extend nuclear power capacity with Sizewell C have been met with stiff resistance.

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Davis, Lay and Patchett deny that the Green Party surge in Suffolk comes down to Nimbyism, though they do allow that the pace of development targets from Whitehall has caused resistance. And speaking of the freeport, Lay offers little to ameliorate stereotypes of campaigners with a proprietorial attitude towards their surroundings, and a scorn for anything concrete or new: “There were a lot of objections to the project from the local people who live on the farms because their view used to be of rolling hills towards Stowmarket — now you’ve got a view of Suffolk’s biggest shed.”

It also seems that the pressures of the renewable energy transition, through developments such as solar farms, are, counterintuitively, pushing farmers and rural voters towards the Green Party. “We just had three solar farm applications go through planning,” says Patchett. “We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places. If developers are taking rich, fertile farming land and wanting to build solar farms on it — then we’re opposed to that.” The Green councillors justify working in opposition to certain green energy developments, because “one, the residents don’t want it and, two, these fields are the wrong place to put it”.

It seems odd that the Greens would be the best party to vocalise these niggles. Why have Davis, Lay and Patchett clustered there rather than in the party most associated with their perspective? “I don’t think the Conservatives have an identity you can get behind. We’re all disillusioned Conservatives, aren’t we? The first time I voted Green was four years ago, I always used to be Blue,” says Davis. Lay puts the Tory conversion to Green politics down to multiple factors, with the issue of competence looming large: “I think [the Truss debacle] reinforced what a lot of people were already thinking and gave them permission to say no — enough is enough.”

Their attempts to convert the surrounding areas have been boosted by recent events. All the Stowmarket Greens have set about capturing the conservationist and bucolic streak within Tory voters that has been alienated by Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero U-turn. “You’d knock on the door of a big detached house. You’d 100% know they were a Conservative voter. They’d have lovely big gardens. They admit to voting Conservative,” says Patchett, “You’d then ask them their views. ‘We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.’ That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.”

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Despite the Stowmarket councillors’ insistence that the Green surge wasn’t down to a protest vote, others see their local victories more pragmatically. One Ipswich resident says they switched from Blue to Green because, “Tories aren’t really Tory anymore. Labour is the above with red ties and barely any real point of distinction. Green is a good protest vote.” Although they do concede that: “I wouldn’t [vote] the same at a general election.”

However, the often dismissed question of building continues to rear its head. Geri Silverstone, a political consultant who has worked closely on Green political issues, tells me the party’s eastern surge is down to infrastructure pressures rather than a wholesale abandonment of the Conservatives. “It’s a reaction to development,” he says. “Those Suffolk districts have been under the cosh to meet government targets. There’s been a backlash from their residents. These areas are predominately 50+ years old and that’s why you’re seeing a movement from traditional Conservative voters to the Greens. It’s an alternative — they think this is a party that’s going to say no.”

Up the coast, in the small, Georgian town of Halesworth, I test this theory out on Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay and local councillor Toby Hammond, who were analysing river water connected to run-off sewage plants. Ramsay also puts the Green swing primarily down to local alienation. But he admits that the Greens have been pursuing a different politics in Suffolk from the one they might in urban enclaves: “You’re going to see a very different style of Green politics in rural Suffolk than you’re going to see in Brighton, certainly. The leader of Mid-Suffolk is a farmer who is very pro-farming. We’re less tied up with some of the more fringe issues discussed elsewhere.”

To scrape beneath the competing rhetoric, I went looking for Green converts at what used to be called “the Conservative Party at prayer” — a local Anglican Church hosting an environmental panel. The event was attended by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury, Thérèse Coffey (then-Secretary for the Environment), Green Party activists, Ramsay and Conservative Councillor Richard Rout. The congregation: a grey sea of fashionably dressed parishioners. I was probably the only person under 30, and one of five under 40. A pensioner, dressed in fashionable workwear, sidled up to me and joked that “Coffey doesn’t know what she’s in for”, and there was an audible grumble as she entered the church.

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Various stalls lining the church outlined local concerns, everything from newts and birds, to the greatly disliked plan to run a series of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to connect an offshore windfarm to the national grid. There were few — Green, Conservative or other — willing to make any kind of case for the potential efficacy of the pylon plan. No one, politician nor voter, mentioned that the cost-of-living and climate crisis, alongside energy security and Net Zero goals, might warrant speed over caution.

Outside, a tall man in a tweed suit, with a voice like Laurence Olivier, identified himself to me as former Conservative Councillor Michael Gower. “I’m a Tory Green! Don’t you believe it,” he bellowed. After asking him what “Tory Greenism” consisted of, Gower told me it’s “about doing things on the ground. I’ve been planting trees and testing water quality. Tories are local activists! We don’t like Sizewell C, and we don’t like the onshoring of wind turbines!” But, after he’d finished, I was none the wiser. Was he a green Conservative or a conservative Green? Was there any difference? How did an objection to onshore wind farms square with his professed environmentalism?

If Suffolk is anything to judge by, the “Green revolt” seems to be powered by those with the wealth and time to force a change in local politics. Rather than a national movement, it will remain a narrow phenomenon, both generationally and geographically, unless it can reach beyond its established confines. Because elsewhere in Halesworth, life goes on.  Young farmers, builders, and tradespeople gather in the pub, easily ignoring rural England’s debate over the future of the nation. The young sink pints, murmuring the politics of dark complaint, while receiving no echo in the church just yards away.

I always called the largest mound a hill fort, though I have no idea if it qualified for the title. This was no Maiden Castle. The ring’s centre can’t have held more than a family and a few pigs. Yet here it still was, thousands of years on. That modest earthwork was my first experience of Deep England — or Deep Britain, since the fort was constructed centuries before England was born.

Deep England is not a place. It is a shock. A sudden awareness of time freed from measurement and scale. Such a shock can be triggered by a hill fort, a shaped stone, a worn staircase. But you don’t need to tramp the Sussex countryside to find Deep England. It can be felt in the paintings of David Inshaw and Simon Palmer, the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, the work of Alan Garner. And at this time of year, it can easily be found in John Masefield’s 1935 Christmas tale The Box of Delights, one of those children’s books best enjoyed by adults.

A brush with Deep England might produce feelings of recognition and homecoming; equally, time’s long drop can inspire eeriness and threat. The best art devoted to England’s deep past is always a shuffling of the familiar and the strange. This makes Christmas the perfect time to reflect on the passage of centuries. There is a strained cosiness to modern Christmas, but beneath the lights and mulled wine lurks the black pause of the year’s end. It is a time for barred doors and ghost stories. John Masefield understood these things.

Masefield was Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. In 1953, Muriel Spark declared that “John Masefield is known to all of us… I do not think there is any need of a book to make him wider known.” My father can still recite Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”, drummed into him as a schoolboy in Sixties Belfast. And yet, a few short decades later, Masefield has joined the ranks of the unread. This is not an unusual fate for a Poet Laureate, but it is sad in Masefield’s case. He wrote good verse, and although some of his work has withered on the page, much still sings.

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If anyone under the age of 60 knows of Masefield today it is because of The Box of Delights. The story is simple enough. Kay Harker is going home for the Christmas holidays. He meets an old eccentric on the station platform, a Punch and Judy showman with a fondness for gnomic utterances: Cole Hawlings. But he is in trouble. He is being hunted across England by dark forces, and although he has powers of his own, they are waning. He asks for Kay’s help: “Now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you would do something to stop their Bite?” Kay agrees to safeguard the Box of Delights, a magical object that serves as a doorway to the distant past.

Masefield was a great proponent of the old-fashioned yarn. In his autobiography So Long to Learn, he emphasised the importance of straightforward storytelling. The rarefied devices of celebrated writers did not interest him. He wanted the spare, salty narratives of earlier epochs: “The sagas with their simple power made the story-telling of most of our masters almost absurd. What was Flaubert, with his labour and richness of language; what was Pater, with his learning and instinct for felicity, to the tellers of the Laxdale or Njala sagas?” For Masefield, “literature” was an obstruction, an elaborate rood screen that hid a story from its audience.

The Box of Delights is a great story simply told. But it is not just the story of Kay Harker. It is the story of Britain. “A nation’s past is the poet’s pasture,” said Masefield, and Kay’s adventures bear this out. The winter landscape surrounding his village is a map of the past: the ruined Abbey, the Roman road, the hill fort known as Arthur’s Camp, even the trees that advance and retreat as Kay moves through time. He marches with legionaries, fights alongside ancient Britons, and gallops through the forest with Herne the Hunter. Always the Wolves are there, a sinister army that harries mankind. Cole Hawlings is himself a figure from the deep past, though fading now. Once the forces of good and evil were evenly matched, but his enemies have learnt new tricks. They employ the latest technology and prosper in plain sight amid respectable society, while Hawlings and his allies must live on the run.

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The tale’s Christmas setting serves as more than a cosy backdrop. The Box of Delights is a book about time, and the Winter Solstice is the appropriate moment to consider the passage of countless years. More specifically, the book is about deep time unfolding in one particular place. And so it is appropriate that in the final chapter, Kay attends the Christmas service at Tatchester cathedral, the thousandth such service to have been held there — the rhythms of worship are the only clock that can measure deep time. While Masefield’s reach extended back far beyond the arrival of Christianity in Britain, the novel is unambiguous in its religious message. Greed and aggression are punished, and the weak triumph at the close. Even Cole Hawlings, who has been knocking about “since Pagan times”, adheres to the new faith:

“In one place, the river ran through a wide cavern, the wall of which had been painted with a procession of men leading bulls and horses. ‘That was our old religion, Master Harker,’ Cole said, nodding towards it. ‘It was nothing like so good as the new, of course…’”

The Box of Delights remains in print. It was brilliantly adapted for the BBC in 1984, with a grizzled and twinkling Patrick Troughton starring as Hawlings, and a play based on the book is currently on at the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no doubt that the novel has an enduring appeal.

While much of the dialogue is couched in Blytonisms (“splendiferous!”), and although its commitment to place and history could not be less fashionable, the story still delivers. It is perhaps more powerful now than when it was first published. Masefield’s world has joined the far-off epochs visited by Kay, just as ours soon will. Layers and layers of time and history will deepen Deep England further. As Cole Hawlings says, “Hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs it goes. And then all the way back again.”

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

And at the heart of it was Euro 96. And at the heart of that was the England manager Terry Venables, who died on Saturday. It wasn’t so much that England played well — other than the frankly incredible 4-1 win over the Netherlands, they didn’t especially. Nor was it even that they reached the semi-final, although that helped — obviously. It was about the mood and the atmosphere. After football’s years of horror and violence, this seemed the consecration of a smarter, cheerier, less confrontational age.

Before kick-off, stadiums were full of smiling fans singing along to “Three Lions”, an anthem that, unusually for a football song, looked on defeat and disappointment and found it beautiful. This was a new sensibility: knowing, ironic, unaggressive. The post-Italia 90 gentrification of football was complete. Or at least it seemed so before another penalty shoot-out defeat to Germany unleashed anger that led to street violence, to German cars being smashed and to a Russian student being stabbed, presumed German. Disillusionment when it came, came quickly.

But that summer still exists as a heady memory of what might have been. Those were the days of youth, of innocence, of possibility. Of Paul Gascoigne lifting the ball over Colin Hendry with his left foot and volleying in with his right, of Teddy Sheringham’s disguised lay-off to Alan Shearer, of Stuart Pearce and a penalty that defined the notion of catharsis. But it was also the summer of Venables — for, without him, England would not have played as they did. For everybody who despaired of the long-ball stereotype, who had watched the anxiety-ridden football of the Graham Taylor years in frustration, this was proof that England could play sophisticated, continental football.

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Yet Venables could hardly have been more London. He had been born in Dagenham, played his first football with Chelsea and achieved his greatest success as a player with Tottenham. He had begun his coaching career with Crystal Palace, performed miracles with Queens Park Rangers and then won the FA Cup after returning to Tottenham. And in the middle of it all, he had been plucked from QPR to manage Barcelona, whom he had led to their first league title in over a decade and their first ever European Cup final.

But he wasn’t just geographically London; he was temperamentally London. He lived with a grin on his face and a sense that rules were always flexible. He tried out as a lounge singer, invented a wig, devised a board game and wrote detective novels. He did his business from hotel lobbies and ran a nightclub that was frequented by football hacks and Mad Frankie Fraser. By the time Euro 96 came round, the FA, worried about some of his business interests, had decided not to renew his contract. He was later banned from being a company director for seven years. And he was also for a time arguably the sharpest tactical brain in Europe.

It would be an exaggeration to say that modern football was born amid the battle between QPR and Watford for promotion from Division Two in the early Eighties, but in their rivalry was encapsulated a key fault line that continues to shape football today. Watford were managed by Taylor, Venables’s predecessor as England manager. When he took over Watford in 1977, they were in the Fourth Division. Within six years, he had taken them to second in Division One. His football then was, as he cheerily admitted, rudimentary: he had his players knock the ball in behind the opposing full-back, then had his side press to try to regain possession in dangerous areas, relying on an aggressive offside trap to offer defensive solidity.

Taylor said that each time his side got promoted he expected to be found out, but that it wasn’t until playing Sparta Prague in the Uefa Cup in 1983 that anybody did, largely because the Czechoslovak defenders had the technical ability not to panic when put under pressure. With better players, he amended his approach to an extent, but he remained always of a school that saw football as a game of chaos, and pressing as a way of guiding that. Venables, in seeking to impose order, was the cerebral Pep Guardiola to Taylor’s Klopp.

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Venables, like Taylor, relied on the offside trap, for which he was dismissed as boring by rivals, but his was part of a possession-based game rooted in a sophisticated system of zonal marking. In that, he was true to a venerable tradition. Between 1912 and 1942, the Inverness-born left-half Peter McWilliam had two stints as manager of Tottenham totalling 23 years. Raised in the Scottish passing tradition, he established a possession-based approach that was taken on by one of his former players, Bill Nicholson, who managed Spurs when Venables was a player there. Another former player was Vic Buckingham, who as a coach spread those ideas to Ajax and subsequently Barcelona. When Barcelona came calling for Venables after he had led QPR to fifth in Division One, they were appointing from within the same philosophical tradition. That was what made the appointment of Venables as England coach after Taylor’s side had failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup so exciting, even if it’s now apparent that the FA did so with a degree of reluctance and suspicion.

Taylor was unfortunate in almost every way — an uninspiring generation of players, injuries, form, refereeing — but he had always felt a slightly humdrum appointment. To turn to Venables was to turn to ambition, to say that English players were capable of more than sweat and graft, that they could do more than hump it over the top and chase it, that they could pass and move like the best in Europe. That didn’t mean they were cavalier; to pigeonhole him merely as “an entertainer” is to misunderstand his approach. Venables pressed and worked on neutering opponents as much as anybody, but he valued ability as much as he did sweat, and he had a gambler’s instinct.

It took time, but then, given the seismic nature of the change, it was always going to. Technically gifted players were prioritised. Carlton Palmer and Des Walker were disposed of, Darren Anderton and Steve McManaman brought in, Paul Gascoigne recalled. Suddenly defenders got forward, players were encouraged to take risks and England became tactically flexible in a way they had never been before and, arguably, haven’t been since.

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It was a world away from the functionality and fear of Taylor’s side and, as such, it was a vital part of that golden summer. Perhaps it even helped that everybody knew Venables was leaving. He had nothing to lose, no new contract to chase, and that allowed him to be bold — not that he ever really needed much encouragement. That brought the glorious apotheosis of the victory over the Netherlands, as he pushed McManaman forward into an adventurous front three and in doing so befuddled the Dutch coach Guus Hiddink.

Venables didn’t win the tournament. Indeed, he only ever won two competitive games as England manager. But he created a vibe that matched that summer of hope, and sometimes the illusion, the feel of the thing, matters more than the reality.

Perhaps, once it was indeed all over, Charlton allowed himself for moment to mind that, having taken England to the final with two goals in the semi-final against Portugal, the ultimate glory had gone to the West Ham boys, while he performed the defensive job Alf Ramsay had given him of marking Germany’s dazzling young star Franz Beckenbauer. Perhaps he was remembering his dead friend Duncan Edwards, who, for the rest of his career, Charlton would insist was the best player he had ever been with on a pitch. Perhaps, without Munich, the honour of leading England to World Cup success would have belonged to “young Duncan”, as Charlton always called him, not Moore. If football is about glory, it is a still painfully human kind of wonder.

Charlton represented what English football was supposed to be. In reality, there was an overt stench around it as he left the game, whether that was the dirty cynicism of the 1973-74 title-winning Leeds team, or the growing violence and racism on the terraces. Results-wise, the national team had fallen into disarray, humiliated by an awful moment of casualness from an ageing Moore in a World Cup qualifier in Chorzów, the heroics of a Polish goalkeeper in the return game at Wembley, and then Don Revie running off to Dubai to take a plush contract from the United Arab Emirates when he was supposed to be managing England for a game against Brazil. Just as I was falling in love with the game, something that had flourished in the Sixties was disappearing, and it was symbolised most potently by Bobby Charlton’s retirement.

Of course, Charlton was an astonishing individual footballer. When he struck the ball on the run, with his head high, he hit it with a visceral straight power, as if each time he sought, once again, to bolt away his grief and guilt into the bulge of the net. But Charlton was also with Dennis Law and George Best, one of an extraordinary integrated trio who led the Manchester United team that won the First Division in 1965 and 1967 as well as the European Cup in 1968.

What completed Charlton’s turn into an ideal of English football was not that he was the only English man in the threesome, but that he had a code. He always showed up, he subordinated his individual talent to the team, and he eschewed excess off the field. Wingers were an essential part of the way Busby wanted Manchester United to play football from the team that was destroyed on the snow-laden runway in Bavaria to the night of European redemption in 1968 at Wembley. For those first seasons after Munich, he did not have them. In 1960, he asked Charlton, an inside forward in the lingo of the Sixties game and already an England international, to move to the left. Charlton spent four seasons playing left wing. Afterwards, looking back on those years, he said: “I hated it but I never really questioned it. If that was what The Boss wanted I did it.”

Best did not have Charlton’s code and off the pitch Charlton could not disguise his disapproval or frustration. Best was absurdly talented, mercurial, petulant, and hedonistic. After England’s World Cup win, English league football became more glamorous, and it was Best who became its prime star. He played not with Charlton’s grace and elegance but with swagger. He could not have sacrificed himself in a World Cup Final. He thought that Ramsay’s tactically-disciplined England marked the end of freedom: “after 1966 the game stopped being a pleasure, the fun went out of it,” he said. But the following season, Charlton, Law, and Best played some of the most-free flowing football ever seen in England. The night Manchester United secured the league they won 6-1 away at Upton Park, with Law scoring twice and Charlton and Best one each against a West Ham team that included all three of the club’s World Cup winners.

Thirty-eight years later, Charlton was back at Upton Park, bearing his sadness, performing a duty. It was the first game Manchester United played after Best’s death from a lifetime of abusing alcohol. The act of commemoration before the game was led by Charlton and the former West Ham player and England international, Trevor Brooking. Afterwards, the Manchester United manager, Alex Ferguson, who, unlike Busby had twice lost the league title in matches at Upton Park and fumed over it, on this occasion heaped praise on West Ham. The applause for Best, he said, “epitomised the sporting love between two great football clubs”. But standing inside Upton Park, I knew it was the presence of Charlton and Brooking that was summoning forth the better angels in West Ham fans to sing Best’s name.

I did not get to see Charlton play in the flesh. But I saw him that late autumn afternoon in 2005, his code intact to honour his brilliant, wayward teammate. It is the only match West Ham have lost in the five decades I have supported the club that I can look back upon with almost complete fondness.

Writing my history of the wars, with the final volume out next week, has occupied 43 years of my life. So what have I learned in the course of my long Odyssey through the chronicles and archives of this remote period? More important, what might others learn? No historian writes entirely for their own satisfaction. They have an imaginary reader in mind whose pleasure is the ultimate test of their work.

The Late Middle Ages was a time of extraordinary contrasts. It was a period in which men, and occasionally women, created works of lasting beauty: buildings, sculpture, jewellery, paintings, novels and histories. It was the age of Chaucer and Gower, of Froissart and Christine de Pisan, of the exquisite miniatures commissioned from the Limbourg brothers by the great Duke of Berry, of the emotionally overpowering sculpture created by Klaus Sluter for the Dukes of Burgundy a generation before Donatello, of the dramatic churches of Mont-Saint-Michel and St. George’s Windsor. The image of decline that hangs over the whole period could not be further from the truth.

Yet the age which created these things was also an age of cruelty and destruction unparalleled in any earlier period and few later ones. Many of its finest buildings were left in flames by passing armies. Paintings and illustrated manuscripts were dispersed, sculptures vandalised,  the work of jewellers and goldsmiths dismantled and melted down to contribute to the costs of war. It has been estimated that France lost about a third of its population, most of them non-combatants, on top of the terrible toll exacted by periodic outbreaks of famine and epidemic disease. It was a time of morbid pessimism and anxiety, when human life was cheap and men and women contemplated the imminent end of the world.

The history of the 14th and 15th centuries is dominated by outsize personalities. The great captains take pride of place, many of them immortalised by Shakespeare: Mauny, Chandos, the Black Prince, Du Guesclin, Salisbury, Fastolf, Talbot and Dunois. We know a great deal more about them than we do about the heroes of earlier ages, not least because the records of government survive more plentifully than for any previous period. But the war’s chroniclers, waspish and prejudiced forerunners of today’s tabloid papers, are supplemented for the first time by contemporary sources of a more personal kind: intimate poetry, biographies, memoirs and personal letters.

Some of the great figures of the time, like Edward III and Henry V have come down to us as cardboard cut-outs, their personalities half hidden behind the mask of government and the clouds of incense in which their contemporaries enveloped them. Others conformed to no established pattern. In an age when power was a prerogative of great noblemen, others broke the mould. Bertrand du Guesclin, the most famous French paladin of the period, came from an obscure gentry family in Brittany. Sir Robert Knollys, the terror of 14th-century Burgundy, probably begun his career as an archer. The same was true of Sir John Hawkwood, the crude English thug who ended up as one of Italy’s most successful soldiers of fortune. His painted monument by Paolo Uccello, an official commission of the Florentine Republic, still dominates the nave of Florence cathedral.

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The war made these men. Geoffrey Chaucer, known to most people only as the author of The Canterbury Tales, was also a soldier and diplomat, a polyglot who read widely in Latin, French and Italian. Charles, Duke of Orléans, was captured at the battle of Agincourt and passed the best years of his life in various English prisons, a pawn in the diplomacy of the period. Yet he was also a fine poet, pouring out his frustration in nostalgic ballads, some of them in English. At the other end of the social scale, Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant when she turned the course of the war at the age of seventeen. She was only two years older when she defended herself with consummate skill at the trial which led to her execution. These extraordinary individuals would be worth meeting in any age.

There was, however, more to the Hundred Years War than exotic heroes and picturesque incidents, more than ever occurred to Froissart or Shakespeare. Until quite recently, war was the main collective activity of mankind. The origin of the modern state lies in the immense feat of organisation required to deploy a community’s resources for war. Most English soldiers were archers, which meant that armies were recruited across a wide social spectrum and in every part of the country. In Scotland, an extraordinarily high proportion of the manpower of the Lowlands fought in Scottish armies on the French side.

But, except in the most primitive societies, wars are not just fought by soldiers. They also depend on countless officials high and low, on recruiting officers and tax collectors, on shipbuilders and seamen, on armourers and metal-founders, on the men who read out proclamations in market squares or built bonfires on coastal hills to warn of invasion. These activities brought the war home to entire populations. A web of rumour united disparate communities. The state was omnipresent. It made people conscious of the state’s ambitions, but also of its failings. They were brought together by the triumphs of Edward III, the Black Prince and Henry V, but also by common grievances, many of which arose from the hardships of war and the bitterness of ultimate defeat. The Hundred Years War was not a total war in the sense that the world wars of the 20th century were total wars. But it came closer to the 20th-century model than any previous wars, perhaps closer than any later one before the age of Napoleon.

England and France responded to these challenges in different ways, with very different consequences. William Pitt the Younger once remarked that the prime material of war was money. Already in medieval Europe, the critical test of the power of the state was its ability to levy taxes. Following a widely accepted maxim of Roman law, most lawyers and philosophers of the time accepted that taxes required the consent of the community that had to pay them. In England, this was a reality. In France it was not. The English Parliament was niggardly in agreeing to war taxes, but at least it generally acknowledged an obligation to support the King’s wars, and its consent bound the whole nation. As a result the financial dependence of the English kings on Parliament was firmly established as a principle. With control of the purse, came political authority. The prominent role of the English Parliament intensified political activity in the communities represented there: the gentry of the shires, royal officials, clients and councillors of the nobility and the oligarchies of the towns. It dispersed political power among a large and coherent political community, forcing a more consensual style of government on the monarchy.

In France events took a different turn. The national and provincial estates were notoriously reluctant to authorise taxation, and when they did their authority was not always recognised by the communities from which they came. In the end, the kings lost patience and levied taxes by royal command, backed up by force. Before the wars, the political institutions of France and England had developed on very similar lines. But writing in the 1460s, Sir John Fortescue, a former chief justice and the author of one of the earliest treatises on the English constitution, distinguished between the “political” monarchy of England and the absolute monarchy of France. Fortescue overstated the power of the French kings, but he was right in a broader sense. The origins of the absolute monarchy of 17th- and 18th-century France lay in the methods needed to defeat the English in the Hundred Years War. France became a military state with a standing army and an aggressive foreign policy. England had only very small permanent forces, and did not become a major player in European politics again until the 18th century.

The English have always rejoiced in their insular status. As early as the 13th century, an English chronicler described it as “set at the end of the world, the sea girding it around”. It was the sentiment which Shakespeare put into the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt. “This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happier lands.” It is part of the classic canon of English patriotism. Yet it was a myth. Politically, England was not an island until defeat in the Hundred Years War made it one. It had been part of a European polity.

Its fortunes were closely intertwined with those of France and the Low Countries. Its kings were peers of France, ruling a large part of western France by hereditary right. They conceived vast continental ambitions. Henry III measured himself against his great contemporary Louis IX of France, once trying to make himself King of Sicily. Edward III claimed the Crown of France as his own. He planned to make one of his sons count of Flanders and another Duke of Milan. A third son claimed the Crown of Castile and tried to make good his claim by armed invasion. Henry V’s errant brother Humphrey had ambitions to rule Hainault and Holland. It was the Hundred Years War that deprived the English kings of their continental dominions, encouraging an insularity that persisted for centuries.

And what if the English had won, as they so nearly did in the early 1420s? If Henry V and the Duke of Bedford had achieved their ambition of uniting France and England under the house of Lancaster, England’s subsequent history would have been very different. In an age when the state was not readily distinguished from the person of the monarch, the concept of the dual monarchy would sooner or later have broken down. England would of necessity have remained a continental power, but in a very particular sense. It would have become a subordinate part of a continental empire whose centre of gravity would inevitably have moved eastward towards its richer and more populous French territory, until the resulting tensions became intolerable. Defeat proved to be as decisive for the future of England as it was for that of France.

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The passions generated by ancient wars eventually fade, but those provoked by the wars of the English in 15th-century France have proved to be surprisingly durable. England’s monarchs continued to call themselves Kings of France long after the title had lost any meaning. In 1797, in the midst of another war with France, when the House of Commons debated peace proposals which would have required George III to abandon the title, one member protested against Pitt the Younger’s description of the title as “a harmless feather”. It was, he said, “gallantly won in the same glorious wars by which we first asserted the claim of our monarchs to that harmless feather… A great nation can never safely be disgraced.”

In France, the memory of English conquests lived on. The foundations of scholarship on the Hundred Years War were laid by patriotic French historians of the 19th century, writing under the shadow of Waterloo and Sedan. The passage of time did nothing to soften their indignation about the fate of their country in the time of Edward III, Henry V and the Duke of Bedford. The extraordinary life and death of Joan of Arc defied historical objectivity until quite recently. For centuries, her story was the focus of powerful political passions: nationalism, Catholicism, royalism and intermittent Anglophobia. Such myths are powerful agents of national identity. The great French historian Marc Bloch subscribed to none of these “-isms”, but even he thought that no Frenchman could truly understand his country’s history unless he thrilled at the story of Charles VII’s coronation at Reims in 1429. Writing in the summer of 1940 in the aftermath of a terrible defeat, Bloch looked to an earlier recovery from the edge of disaster for reassurance about the survival of France.

We are no strangers to long-term conflicts. The struggle of Russia to dominate eastern Europe is three centuries old. The three wars which France and Germany fought between 1870 and 1945 can plausibly be regarded as one conflict finally settled only by the internal transformation of Germany. The Hundred Years War was a conflict of that order. It is a powerful story, a story of the emergence of the two great nation-states of medieval Europe, nations which once had much in common, but gradually grew apart in a tide of organised violence. It is above all a story of the impact of war on those who directed it, on those who fought it and on those whose lives were disrupted or destroyed by it. It happened six centuries ago, but the themes are timeless.

At least Davey appeared to know what was going on. Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s former deputy prime minister, posted celebratory photos after inadvertently watching an old game rather than Australia’s quarter-final win over France. But the broader point is the same: politicians in both the UK and Australia have been desperate to leap aboard the bandwagon.

In the UK, the Lionesses’ successes have been splashed across front as well as back pages. Viewing figures have been extraordinary, particularly given games are being played in the mornings: 7.2 million people watched England’s quarter-final win over Colombia (only 300,000 fewer than watched the finale of Happy Valley) and, given the final of the Euros last year drew 11.2 million, it’s safe to assume Sunday’s final against Spain will attract well over 10 million. it may even challenge the Coronation, which drew 12.03 million, as the most-watched programme of the year. What that means is far harder to say.

It is common in the wake of sporting successes to make great claims about their wider significance. Yet history isn’t always a helpful guide. Despite South Africa’s rugby union World Cup win in 1995 and footballing success at the Africa Cup of Nations the following year, it is not a happy and harmonious rainbow nation. Nor did the victory of France’s “Black-Blanc-Beur” side at the 1998 football World Cup end prejudice and racial tension there. Which is not to say that those triumphs and the celebrations that followed were worthless: symbols can still have value even if the ideal they represent remains distant, perhaps unattainable.

Jules Rimet, the French Fifa president who oversaw the birth of the men’s tournament, believed the World Cup would be a force for good, fostering greater understanding and brotherhood among nations. Even at the first World Cup, in 1930, it must have been hard to maintain that idealism as the Argentina captain Luis Monti received death threats from Uruguayan fans before the final, after which Uruguayan property in Buenos Aires was stoned and torched. By 1934 in Italy, when Mussolini took charge and turned the tournament into a celebration of fascism, it became impossible.

But then what can be expected from sport? The Olympic Games was launched in 1896 with similarly high-minded ideals; its sixth edition, scheduled for Berlin in 1916, had to be abandoned because of the First World War. Nobody, though, could realistically say, as a result, that Baron De Courbertin had failed. 

So, what are major sporting events for? The expense of the London Olympics, which in retrospect can feel like a halcyon fortnight of success and national pride, was justified in part by the supposed health benefits brought by increased participation. As it turned out, participation decreased in each of the three years that followed, although there were economic benefits. 

Again, it would be easy to be cynical but the context is important. The Games were awarded to London on 6 July 2005. A day later, 52 people were killed and hundreds injured in attacks on the city’s transport network by four suicide bombers. As Emeli Sandé’s rendition of “Abide With Me” at the opening ceremony made clear, the two events were linked: the Games became about defiance, about the assertion of De Coubertin’s ideals of human striving in the face of terror. Munich in 1972 and Atlanta in 1996 faced that issue far more directly.

In Australia, this World Cup has created an unprecedented buzz around football and women’s sport. The semi-final was the most watched TV event in Australian history, surpassing Cathy Freeman’s 400m gold medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Yet the example of Freeman shows how fragile the supposed lessons of sport can be. At the time, it was claimed that Freeman’s success heralded a new, more inclusive Australia, yet just a year later the Australian government turned away the Tampa, a Norwegian freighter laden with asylum seekers it had rescued from the seas north of Christmas Island. 

This year, nobody is making any grandiose claims about the broader significance of England’s progress to the final. Attempts to draw sweeping lessons from the fact that England are thriving under Sarina Wiegman when they struggled under Phil Neville are probably best avoided, unless the lesson is simply never to appoint Phil Neville. 

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Sport, after all, rarely offers straightforward messages. Consider England men’s success in the 1966 World Cup. After the various embarrassments of the Fifties, it was a reassertion of English supremacy, the mother of the game striking back. But what did that mean? The greatest of those embarrassments had come at Wembley in November 1953 with a 6-3 defeat to Hungary, the first time England had ever lost at home to non-British or Irish opposition. The symbolism of that result seemed obvious: dynamic, modern, socialist Hungary upsetting moribund old imperial England at what was then still called the Empire Stadium. It was a footballing precursor of Suez — even if, as British troops landed in Egypt in October 1956, Hungary was rising up against its Communist leaders; the narrative of British decline was far more solid than that of the Hungarian future.

The wider context of 1966, however, was not the return of imperial might but of Britain — or at least England — embracing the new reality and undergoing reinvention as a home of a vibrant and irreverent youth culture. Alf Ramsey may have been a (very) unlikely leader of it, but his England side, captained by the ineffably cool Bobby Moore, became part of swinging London. That mood was embodied in the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, a lion with a Beatle haircut in a Union flag jersey, which chimed with the use of the flag and roundel in pop art and by bands such as The Who. The imperial lion had been transformed into something cheeky and welcoming, but it was also a commercial ploy, the first time a World Cup had thought to devise a mascot whose image could transform T-shirts and tea-towels into saleable souvenirs.

While there was certainly celebration in 1966 — it was, an AA spokesman said, “like VE Night, election night and New Year’s Eve rolled into one” — the sense is of something more contained. In the week after the final, newspaper follow-ups tended to consist of apologies from writers who had doubted Ramsey and reflections on what success might mean for the popularity of English domestic football. Nobody was talking then about a post-imperial nation rediscovering its roar, but with an ironic edge.

“Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks was displaced at number one in the charts on the Saturday of the quarter-final but, as Dominic Sandbrook notes in White Heat, it captured the general mood: the weather was good, wages were up, and, with Britain feted for everything from James Bond to Mary Quant, David Hockney to David Bailey, The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, the World Cup win was confirmation of the self-confidence of the age. Thirty years later, England men’s progress to the semi-final of Euro 96 felt similarly linked to a blossoming of British culture, to Blur and Oasis, Damien Hirst and Danny Boyle — who, of course, would shape much of the narrative around London 2012 by directing the opening ceremony. Even Bond had emerged from a six-year hiatus with the release of Goldeneye eight months earlier.

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It is different when you’re not hosting, of course, but this World Cup hasn’t felt part of a cultural moment, even if it has been far more mainstream and of a far higher standard than any previous women’s tournament. Quite rightly, there are concerns about the disparity in funding in the women’s game in different regions, but none of the debutants have looked out of their depth; there have been no thrashings like the 13-0 defeat Thailand suffered against the USA four years ago.

Quality of football is one thing, but what makes a tournament is moments and narrative, and this is a World Cup that has had both in abundance: the Lauren James stamp, the Sam Kerr equaliser, the doomed beauty of Japan’s play, the early exits of Germany and Brazil, Megan Rapinoe’s missed penalty against Sweden, Linda Caicedo recovering from cancer to score against Germany, Thembi Kgatlana’s late winner for South Africa against Italy, Spain’s progress despite the mutiny against their coach, Ella Toone’s thunderous finish…

England, in particular, has been provided with a new clutch of role models, from the buccaneering Lucy Bronze to the rapid Lauren Hemp to the scheming Keira Walsh. Available again after suspension for her red card against Nigeria, there could yet be a redemption tale for Lauren James. At the heart of it all has been Wiegman, who has reached her fourth final in her fourth major tournament. Commanding and undemonstrative, she was able to field the same starting XI in every game in leading England to the Euros last summer; this time, with injury ruling out three key players, she has had to be far more flexible and the result has been football that, while less expansive, has probably been all the more impressive. (Although, of course, it is indicative of the advantages England enjoy over other nations in terms of funding that they could afford to appoint the Dutch coach).

But perhaps the specifics matter less than the fact that England are playing well in a tournament that palpably matters. Success at the Euros did raise participation, with 32% of girls now playing football at break-time at school compared to 22% before that tournament. Women’s Super League attendances also rose dramatically last season and will presumably keep going up, increasing revenue and opportunity.

Whether this is part of some wider cultural movement, whether that matters and how long any impact lasts, it is almost certainly too early to tell. But this is undoubtedly very good news for women’s football in England. As to how good, perhaps the best guide would be to ask Davey or Joyce what they made of a game in a year or two.

As teams do whatever it takes to win, swearing by the rather un-cricket mantra of by hook or by crook, is it any surprise that esprit de corps has wound up a collateral casualty? This is more significant than it appears at first blush. Historically, especially in the early decades of the previous century, the sentimentalisation of sportsmanship enabled cricket to declaim a unifying myth that was for the better part true. The “spirit of the game”, trite as this might sound, was the glue holding together the riff-raff and the ruling class, black and white — or so the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James argued in Beyond a Boundary, indisputably the best book on cricket, published 60 years ago. On the field, he argued, all social divisions were transcended, even if only fleetingly. For players were bound together by the “code” of cricket.

What the game looks like in default of such a code is plain to see. Around the same time Bairstow was having his battles with the bails, there detonated the bombshell ICEC report, “Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket”. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Over three in four black and brown respondents spoke of having faced racial discrimination, substantiating the Yorkshire player Azeem Rafiq’s charge made before a parliamentary inquiry last year. Since then, heads have rolled — though not those of his harassers. Rafiq has left Britain on account of the abuse following his testimony. Incredibly, the man tasked with reforming Yorkshire’s club, Kamlesh Patel, has been hounded out his position as well. As in Yorkshire, so in Essex, where the black cricketer Maurice Chambers was repeatedly called a monkey and taunted with a banana. C.L.R. James, one suspects, must be rolling in his Trinidadian grave. For the game he describes in Beyond a Boundary is many worlds apart from the game it has become. Time was the “spirit of game” was more than a cynical expedient to clobber opponents. As James has it, it is something of a higher, even egalitarian calling.

James was drawn to cricket at an early age. It was, he describes, one half of a double inheritance. There was, on both sides of the family, the Puritan bequest, which translated into a generosity of spirit embodied by his aunt Judith: “whenever I went to see her, [she] fed me with that sumptuousness which the Trinidad Negroes have inherited from the old extravagant plantation owners”. The spirit of cricket was only an extension of this habit of mind. And it was a stroke of luck that his home gave on to a cricket pitch, his “window exactly behind the wicket”. Tunapuna, his hometown of 3,000 a stone’s throw from Port of Spain, was a cricket-crazy place. All in all, “a good case could be made for predestination”, he slyly writes.

But the sport was also an engine for rising above hoi-polloi. It’s no secret, of course, that cricket has always been a game of certain pretensions. We immediately understand, for instance, the significance of Paul Pennyfeather’s social handicaps in Decline and Fall when he declaims, “I don’t know a word of German, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t play cricket.” For James, the game furnished a certain respectability — and “respectability was not an ideal; it was an armour”. The older Jameses craved it just as the young C.L.R. did. His father saw to it that the young C.L.R. acquired the cultural capital needed to secure a spot at Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad’s Eton. There, he studied Latin and Greek under Oxbridge types, who, more importantly, “taught a code, the English public-school code”. If all of this sounds Bridesheady, it’s because it is. He took a de haut en bas view of his fellow natives, whom he disdained because they were less au fait with Burke than he was. “Intellectually I lived abroad, chiefly in England.” Vanity Fair came as a revelation: “George Osborne was the hero.” One can see the appeal of snobbery. Later in life, he would credit “Thackeray, not Marx”, for his turn to the Left.

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A career path had been cut out for him: Oxford (read: prestige), lawyering (read: prosperity), political office (read: power). But the rebel had other plans. The lure of cricket wasn’t feasibly resisted. Though he would later be embarrassed by his choice, he plumped to play for Maple, the club for light-skinned West Indians. Shamrock and Queen’s Park Oval were “almost exclusively white… I would have been more easily elected to the MCC than to either.” Stingo was “plebeians: the butcher, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the casual labourer, with a sprinkling of unemployed. Totally black and no social status whatsoever.” Shannon belonged to the “black lower-middle class: the teacher, the law clerk, the worker in the printing office”. Maple, by contrast, was distinctly “brown-skinned and middle class”.

As he later explained, though not entirely in an attempt at self-exculpation, “the Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people and about 15 or 20 per cent who are a varying combination of white and black. From the days of slavery, they have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black… It is not too much to say that in a West Indian colony, the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.” All of which is to say cricket in James’ time was no post-racial, anti-elitist Eden. Yet it was the “spirit of the game” that prevented the uglier instincts of a hidebound society from raising their head: “The foregoing makes it easy to misunderstand the atmosphere in which we played. We never quarrelled. When we played, Shannon, Maple, and Stingo members mixed easily on the same side.” Social tensions were sublimated into a sporting register, the cricketing drama of strokes and catches. “The sportsmanship was clean… Racialism did very little harm… If I had the power, I wouldn’t alter one selection.”

Racism and elitism very simply were, as the common phrase goes, “not cricket”. More than a game, it seems, cricket for James was a temperament: “as soon as we stepped on to the cricket field, we were a motley crew: the children of some white officials and white business men, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, Indian boys, poor black boys… We learned to play [as a] team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip.” It is no accident that such a worldview — ironically of patrician derivation — primed James for a life on the Left. A political awakening of sorts swiftly followed. The snobbishness retreated. His sympathies for the lower orders became more pronounced in industrial Lancashire, where he arrived in 1932 to help the cricketing giant Learie Constantine write his autobiography. Not long after, he became a cricket columnist for the Manchester Guardian, as it then was, on the strength of that connection. For five years, he shuttled between his Hampstead home and Lord’s, while also working on his pioneering survey of the Haitian Revolution. Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, the year he left for the New World.

There he stayed for 15 years, not seeing a single cricket match for all of that time. Instead, he immersed himself in the Pythonesque quarrels of the American Left, one micro-party accusing the other of selling out. The most formative episode of his American stay, though, was a basketball scandal in the early Fifties. What transpired was far from revelatory: in time-honoured fashion, college players fixed matches in cahoots with bookies. Yet, such an innocent James was, it came as a revelation to him. How could these young men betray their teams? His American friends understandably rolled their eyes. But the middle-aged James just couldn’t get over it. Rather touchingly in Beyond a Boundary, he records his “instinctive repulsion” on learning of “these crimes”.

America proved too much. James, unsurprisingly, came hurtling back home to reacquaint himself with that treasured breed of his, the cricketing “genus Britannicus”. In later years, he did his bit to make the gentleman’s game a fairer one. In his brief spell back home in Trinidad as the editor of The Nation in 1958, for instance, he combined political activism and cricket to bring an end to the age white Test captaincy in West Indies. By all accounts, it was an unpleasant campaign — most definitely “not cricket”. The previous captain, Gerry Alexander, whom James insinuated was a racist for sending back the intemperate Roy Gilchrist from the team’s India tour, possibly had his reasons. Gilchrist had bowled one too many beamers and — apparently — even pulled a knife on Alexander. Still, installing the black Frank Worrell was an important milestone. Less rational was James’ uncritical adoration of the mediocre batsmen Wilton St Hill. With a batting average of 27.15, he was, rather perversely, likened to Bradman (the Don’s average: 95.14). It would have been a baffling encomium but for James’ appropriation of the comedian Jimmy Durante’s signature phrase: “that’s my boy”. As James put it with candour, “Wilton St Hill was our boy.”

“Our boys”, as it were, are in short supply these days. Most Brits no longer relate to the players on the field. In our time, the talent pathway runs through public schools. A curious inversion has transpired: in society at large, and indeed football among other ball games, meritocracy has become a watchword and racism has declined; in cricket, however, the opposite has been true. The day the ICEC report hit the front pages, a visual corroboration materialised in the England XI selected for the second Ashes Test. It was Lord’s in the year 2023, but it could have been the House of Lords circa 1923. All 11 players were white; nine were privately educated.

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Of all the Test batsmen who have debuted for England since 2011, some 95% have been white, and 77% from private schools (a mere 7% in the country have attended these). This when one in five cricketers at the academy level are South Asian. Likewise, between 1995 and 2020, the number of black professional cricketers has fallen by 75%. Adil Rashid, from a Bradford two-up two-down, these days it is the exception that proves the rule. What we have witnessed, in nuce, is nothing less than the strange death of progressive cricket. What on earth has happened? For one thing, cricket has ceased to belong to our zeitgeist. Football has stolen a march on it, not least because run-of-the-mill cricket kits can set you back north of £500. At the turn of the millennium, moreover, penurious schools across England set about selling their playing fields. Furthermore, Test cricket has moved behind a televisual paywall since 2005.

It is worth remembering that a hundred years ago, it was cricket, and not football, that was the national game, binding the classes together. Emblematic was the popular Gentlemen vs Players fixture that ran from 1806 to 1963, paid working-class professionals in the employ of county clubs playing against unpaid amateurs of aristocratic and bourgeois stock. The two classes also played shoulder to shoulder in the same teams, though in a singularly and preeningly English way. The lower and higher orders took the field through separate gates at Lord’s, the latter having their initials precede their surnames on scorecards (and vice versa for the former). Freud would have described this as the narcissism of small differences. More substantively, though, cricket was a game for all. Received wisdom had it that when England needed a fast bowler, “all it had to do was whistle down a Nottinghamshire coal mine”. Just as D.H. Lawrence was saved from a career at the colliery by his facility with words, his near-neighbour Harold Larwood was whisked away from the pits thanks to his way with the ball. From Fred Trueman to Freddie Flintoff, it’s been a subaltern’s game. As late as the mid-Nineties, four in five Test cricketers were state school kids.

Now is a good time to remember this history. Clearly, we’re in the midst of a cricketing renaissance. “Bazball”, the new style of cricket — bolder, riskier, faster — inaugurated by the captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, has given the game a new tenor. Victories in white-ball cricket, too, have been infectious. Some of the stardust has rubbed off on the unabridged game. The opening fixture of the Ashes brought in a staggering 2.1 million viewers, Sky Sports reported, the highest ever for a Test match. Even the stumping affair showed a renewed interest in the game, the British and Australian prime ministers crossing bats over the matter. Australia will retain the Ashes, but there is now a momentum to English cricket. There’s no telling how the next Ashes will pan out. But first, England will need to cleanse the Augean stables and rediscover the Jamesian spirit of the game.

There was something touchingly awkward about Southgate. He seemed shy and decent, his fabled waistcoat a totem of a nobler age as he probed at the boundaries of his role, recognising that this wasn’t just about getting a result against Tunisia or working out a way not to be terrible at penalties — that being England manager meant he could, perhaps should, play a social role. 

By 2021, he had fully embraced this, writing an open letter in which he set out the “duty” of England players to “interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice”. Two years on, that letter has inspired James Graham’s play, Dear England, which launched at the National this week.

Football has a way of catching up with all managers. As Brian Clough’s great mentor Harry Storer observed, it is a game in which nobody ever says thank you. Successes are quickly forgotten; frustration the default mood. After leading England in three tournaments, there’s a background grumble of discontent around Southgate. He’s too defensive, too grey, too soft, pundits and fans complain; he needs to release the handbrake and let this unprecedented generation of attacking talent take wing. They must be unleashed. That he has overseen a level of achievement not enjoyed since the days of Alf Ramsey half a century ago, or that he has been in charge for 40% of all major knockout games ever won by England, is often ignored.

Southgate became England manager by mistake, which was greatly to his advantage. The England national team had been in a mess for a decade. Sven-Göran Eriksson had left after the Wag-fuelled hedonism and disappointment of the 2006 World Cup. Under Steve McClaren, England failed even to qualify for Euro 2008 — then the 2010 World Cup, under the Italian martinet Fabio Capello, was even worse than 2006. Roy Hodgson, with his accent from British gangster films of the Sixties, was a step back to traditional virtues. But nothing improved. The nadir came as they were eliminated from Euro 2016 by Iceland four days after the Brexit referendum. 

“Fuck off, Europe, we voted out,” chanted fans, as Europe and the quarter-finals went on quite happily without England. Hodgson was replaced by Sam Allardyce who lasted 67 days before the Football Association panicked and forced him to resign following a Telegraph sting that amounted to very little, but did, thanks to the lighting on the footage produced by their secret cameras, seem to depict him drinking a pint of wine. Continental sophisticate he was not; and he never made any secret of his pro-Brexit leanings. 

Enter Southgate, who was the Under-21 coach and whose main draw was the fact he was available. He seems neither to have sought nor particularly wanted the job; he was very much an accidental hero, a Richard Hannay figure plucked suddenly from the largely uneventful world of youth football into one of highest-profile roles in the country. He thrived. England have probably never gone into a World Cup with lower expectations than they did in Russia 2018. But Southgate created a likeable, engaging side. They had fun in a swimming pool with inflatable unicorns. They hammered Panama. They even won a penalty shoot-out. 

And through it all, Southgate seemed an admirably calm, unflappable presence. After the penalty shoot-out win over Colombia, he made a point of consoling both Colombia’s coach, José Pékerman, and Carlos Bacca, who had missed the decisive kick. There was an old-fashioned decency about him that stood in obvious contrast to the post-Brexit machinations in Westminster. To a certain constituency, there was something consoling in that: this was an appealing image of Englishness.

But it was not everyone’s image of Englishness. When, following a squad discussion (for Southgate’s leadership is, of course, consensual), England players took the knee before a pre-Euro 2020 friendly in Middlesbrough, they were booed. That was the context of Southgate’s open letter. During the pandemic, footballers (and their pay packets) also became an easy target for politicians seeking a scapegoat — Matt Hancock, unsurprisingly, foremost among them. 

Now, footballers’ wages may be obscene, but are they more obscene than, say, the pay of hedge-fund managers or the executives of utility companies? Why were they not urged to sacrifice more? Could it be because, for those critics and the audience they were appealing to, the social background of the person making the money is what really counts?

If anything, football generally demonstrated its social conscience during lockdown. It wasn’t just Marcus Rashford and his campaigns for free meals for schoolchildren during holidays; Jordan Henderson organised the Players Together campaign to arrange donations to the NHS, while countless others made donations to hospitals, food banks and local charities. A couple of decades ago, sports stars were essentially billboards: their off-pitch purpose was to wear their sponsors’ gear and keep quiet. Post-Colin Kaepernick, though, there has been an increasing willingness to speak out on political issues. Whether that is, as Southgate said, a “duty” or merely a right is debatable, but, particularly as football has become a theatre for Middle Eastern foreign policy, it seems absurd to expect players to “stick to football”.

What is notable now about Southgate’s letter, published a week after the booing at Middlesbrough (and two days after taking the knee at a subsequent game brought boos that were soon drowned out by applause), is how defensive it is. He emphasises his patriotism, filtered through the figure of his grandfather, who served in the Royal Marines in the Second World War. He talks about his love of the queen and pageantry, and describes England as “an incredible nation”. There is a very deliberate distancing of himself from the suspicion he might be a bit Remainery, a bit cosmopolitan, a bit liberal.

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More significant is his focus on the “pride” that he insists all England players feel, which is ostensibly a rebuttal of the charge that modern players in their gilded bubbles don’t care for the national team, but seems also, in the context of the booing of support for Black Lives Matter, to hint at his multicultural, multiracial team as the avatar of a more diverse England. And this is one of the ironies of football: it still has huge issues with race, both in terms of abuse from the terraces and of representation in the dugout, in the boardroom and in the press-box. On the pitch, though, football is as diverse an industry as there is in England: obviously nothing is absolutely perfect but, by and large, teams are meritocracies in which the only question asked is how good you are. 

After attacking those who “choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin”, Southgate wrote that “it’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society”, which seemed an extremely optimistic take on how post-Brexit England may appear. The racist abuse suffered online by Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after they missed penalties in the shoot-out in the final perhaps came as a grim reminder of how far that ideal world is from the reality.

There was also a disappointing dose of reality in Qatar last year as England (and every other team) were timid in highlighting just how disgraceful it was that the World Cup was being held in a country so obviously in breach of Fifa statutes against discrimination on race, gender and sexuality, or that infrastructure had been built through scandalous labour practices. But perhaps that is understandable: a football team is primarily a football team; it’s not a vehicle to drive social change. Certainly, the players were not the villains in Doha.

But then football is itself a political act. Show me how you play, as the Uruguayan theorist Eduardo Galeano put it, and I will tell you who you are. Minor quibbles can be raised about Southgate as a manager, notably over his capacity to make in-game changes, but the most prevalent criticism is that he is too cautious. Again, this is not unique to him, and is a very common complaint at international level — partly because national sides, having less time to prepare, are always less slick than the best club teams; and partly because a lot of people with limited knowledge of football get involved at major tournaments and demand to be entertained and excited. 

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For some, though, that has become merged with doubts over Southgate’s (apparently) liberal principles. He is the establishment bureaucrat thwarting the will of the people; if only he would stand aside, with his pettifogging insistence on process, the glory of the English people could be unleashed. This, of course, is precisely the arrogance that has dogged English football since countries outside Britain started to get good at the game a century ago: the assumed superiority that means England approach most tournaments believing themselves to be among the favourites.

In 2018, England had sunk to the point that expectation was lowered, which perhaps made it easier for Southgate to enact his decent revolution. By 2021, the expectation was back, and in Southgate’s insistence his players should be “humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves”, there seemed a veiled warning against the arrogance of old — the arrogance of English exceptionalism that, for some, perhaps, explained Brexit.

That has meant there has been an extra edge in some of the criticism of him; there is a clear sense from certain fans that Southgate is not one of them. But, as Southgate acknowledges, there are multiple Englishnesses. His is open, thoughtful and tolerant — which in the modern world feels a refreshing change. This is the word of the anteater.