“I think it’s great. You give the country something to cheer about… with Brexit at the moment they probably need something to cheer about. It’s a job of the team to make the country happy.”

He was speaking before the Commons decided to take the plunge and vote for a general election, but what he said raises an intriguing question: could an England victory have any impact on the politics of the moment? Will Boris Johnson enjoy a World Cup bounce if the team arrives back in London on Monday bearing the Webb-Ellis trophy aloft?

Leaving aside the impossibility of subjecting these questions to definitive psephological analysis (the pollster’s tools are simply too blunt an instrument to capture something as fleeting and ephemeral as how sporting success or failure might impact the political mood) we have to fall back on anecdotal evidence.

For sport to exert any political pull, context is all: when England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003 it was the mid-point of Tony Blair’s second administration, so if there was an effect it didn’t matter much.

Sometimes England’s victory in the football world cup in 1966 is cited as evidence that sport can influence politics: it is said Harold Wilson enjoyed a boost from the team’s success in that year’s general election. Nice theory, except that the election took place months before the tournament.

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A more persuasive example came four years later in 1970 when some of the politicians, at least, felt football really did affect the outcome of that general election.

It was  Sunday 14 June and England were playing West Germany in the quarter-finals. With 20 minutes to go they were 2-0 up, then disaster struck: England goalie Peter Bonetti, a replacement for Gordon Banks who was out with a stomach bug, committed a series of blunders and the Germans won 3-2. Four days later, Harold Wilson’s Labour Party went down to an unexpected defeat at the hands of Ted Heath.

Subsequently, Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins, among others, claimed they had detected a political fallout from the football result; there was a palpable glumness among the voters, they later recalled, who took out their discontent on the government.

Is it true? It seems logical that the national mood is at least to some extent affected by sport. The 2012 London Olympics, for instance, did create a real, if temporary, sense of public buoyancy.

But does rugby have the same impact? Does it have the same ability to change the political weather? Football is, we are constantly told, “the national game” and, in terms of spectator numbers, that is clearly true.

But rugby has a perfect right to consider itself the runner-up in those stakes. The figures are compelling. Including everyone from senior professionals to schoolboy and schoolgirl players, it is estimated there are more than two million people who currently play rugby in England — more than twice as many as cricket.

The emphasis there should be on the word ‘play’. Rugby has always been a participatory sport: going back a generation to before the professional era, attendances at rugby matches, even at the biggest clubs such as Leicester, would regularly be in the low hundreds — but there were still tens of thousands of people playing the game. Things are different now: the opening match in this season’s top tier competition, the Rugby Premiership, which featured Bristol against local rivals Bath, drew a crowd of nearly 27,000.

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The professional era has changed the game as a spectacle, beyond all recognition. What the Premiership now offers is a fast-moving and skilful athletic contest a world away from the often static mud-bound struggles of yesteryear. What’s more, the game these days is cleverly marketed and expertly presented on TV. The premiership is in the hands of BT Sport and they’ve shown themselves to be excellent partners; the average weekend viewing figures for rugby on BT is in excess of 800,000 and England’s success at this World Cup is likely to give that a further boost.

England’s match against the All Blacks last weekend recorded an audience of 10 million — at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, mark you — which suggests there’s a very big market for the game out there and tomorrow’s final will draw a massive last audience. An England victory will undoubtedly supercharge the game’s popularity, so it’s reasonable to expect the growth to continue.

The charge is often thrown at rugby that it is an elitist sport and therefore one that cannot move the country as football does. The hoariest of clichés is that of Barbour-jacketed rich men doling out champagne and smoked salmon to their posh mates from the tailgate of their Range Rovers in the Twickenham car park on match day in the Six Nations.

Such people do exist, but they’re far from typical — and anyway, are they so different from the prawn sandwich munchers in the VIP boxes at football grounds? But the everyday reality of rugby is very different. Anyone who thinks rugby is a sport for toffs should make a visit to a ground like Kingsholm, home of Gloucester: sometimes nicknamed ‘Castle Grim’, the oldest stand at the ground, ‘The Shed’, is about as earthy as it gets. Anyone attending match day there will be quickly disabused of any notion that rugby is elitist. Furthermore, some of the rising stars of the sport  — men like the outstanding prop forward Kyle Sinckler — give the lie to the ‘toff’ charge.

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Sinckler is a formidable player but his life story is an inspiring tale of how rugby can change individual lives. Raised by his mum on a tough council estate in Tooting, south London, Sinckler was, by all accounts, an aggressive boy. But a friend’s suggestion that he should try rugby led to him signing on as a schoolboy player with Battersea Ironsides, a club founded by soldiers from the Royal Tank Regiment during the Second World War. Suddenly that natural aggression found its proper outlet and, combined with a natural athletic talent, he rose rapidly through the ranks and was capped for England under-16s.

Two weeks ago, as Sinckler crashed over for a try under the posts against the Aussies, that promise was fulfilled and it’s not unreasonable to think his achievements will have ignited ambition in other young hearts. And Sinckler is far from alone: ex-public schoolboys are still probably over-represented in the ranks of professional rugby players but that is changing.

For one thing, the rewards on offer for professional players these days are tempting: the average salary for a player in the  English Premiership is now more than £200,000 and for star players much higher than that. Charles Piutau, formerly of Auckland, New Zealand, became rugby’s first “million pound man” when he signed for Bristol last year.

One of the  factors that previously prevented rugby competing for talent outside the ranks of the already comfortably off was that you couldn’t make a decent living at it. That is no longer so. Admittedly rugby players, even the best of them, earn a lot less than the highest paid footballers but by most people’s standards they still look pretty good.

Given all that, the outlook for English rugby is rosy. Old prejudices about rugby being an exclusively middle-class sport are withering away under the impact of professionalism and the wider audience the sport is now reaching.

If England do lift the trophy this Saturday — and the omens are good — rugby will enjoy a moment in the spotlight which will attract more people — players and spectators — into the rugby family. A victory parade through London is being mooted, probably next Tuesday; there will be a welcome lifting of the national mood and one not exclusively confined to the ranks of old, white men (though we, too, will be among those celebrating).

As for Boris, I can’t see him passing up this opportunity: tea and photo-opportunity at No 10, Mr Sinckler?

As with her view of nuclear weapons – “get rid of ours and ask the Russians to do the same later” – or of universal wearing of uniforms – “just issue them and people would stop going to clothes shops” – she was not sweating the details, but she did have a firm view that men caught in possession of round balls should be dealt with abruptly.

Dear mum – so much of her worldview seemed to me, even as a youngster, to be barmy, but the football thing? Maybe she was on to something. This Friday sees the start of a real sports tournament, the Rugby World Cup, during which time I will once again ask myself whether mother, after all, knows best: in fact we should all embrace our salvation from soccer.

The World Cup, played over the next month or so in Japan, will be watched by fans from Tonga to Kenya, Russia to New Zealand; even the USA, where it’s become a big deal in universities. And, of course, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, both north and south.

If football really is our “national game” we are, as a group of nations, pretty bad at it. It certainly doesn’t bring us joy. Sometimes when I listen to Garry or Rob, droning on during The Today Programme sports news about some ghastly score draw in the Scottish League (the only news line being that someone chucked a coin at the goalie), I wonder whether the sporting powers that be properly understand the truth: that the game really binding us together as a nation is not football but rugby union.

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Every corner of the UK is good at it. The Scots are unlikely to win the World Cup but they have a fantastic team who will last the course with the world’s best – and they are the weakest of the Home Nations. The Irish (including several players from Northern Ireland) could win, as might either Wales or England. Indeed Ireland, England and Wales are all in the top five world rankings.

So this World Cup should be a celebration of a sport that we are all good at: in the South Wales Valleys, the Scottish Lowlands, in Lancashire and the East Midlands, all the way down to Cornwall where the long running campaign for a national stadium is led by supporters of the Cornish Pirates rugby team. Rugby does not need to “come home” because it is already home. It is part of life.

It is also a morally superior sport to football, one that teaches youngsters how to respond to adversity, how to be strong, how to win well and lose well too. How to overcome physical fear. How to be the person they want to be under pressure.

Am I as dotty as mum in thinking this? Actually not. There are examples of rugby players and supporters behaving badly, including an infamous case of organised cheating known as “Bloodgate” in which Harlequins faked blood injuries in order to have players taken off the field and replaced at vital moments (when the rules would have prevented a fresh player coming on for any other reason).

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This is sad, but on fields the length and breadth of the country, and all around the world, hundreds of thousands of players from minor leagues up to national teams prove weekend after weekend that these are exceptions. The rule in rugby is generosity of spirit and honesty of purpose.

That honesty is a big point of difference with the infernal game of soccer. It is highly unusual (and normally only happens in France) for a player on a rugby field to pretend that he or she is injured. In fact they normally play on with bits of them hanging off in the manner of Monty Python’s Black Knight: “Tis but a flesh wound …”

This is the code – you go down when you are truly knackered or broken and only then. For children – for all of us – in a world of fake victimhood, rugby teaches that there is a better way.

It is a violent sport; there is no escaping that, indeed it is a big part of the attraction. While footballers are dancing around and falling over if they so much as get a sniff of a push from behind, rugby players attack each other with terrible force.

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I had a fascinating conversation recently with Maro Itoje, the 18-stone England star, about why he enjoyed the violence. “Getting smoked”, as he put it, was as important to him as the destruction he wrought on his opponents. There is something gut-clearing about being able to survive, even prosper, in an all-out war. Itoje, a gentle twinkly-eyed man, is an advertisement for the organised carnage of top-class rugby.

Of course the game is much less lawless than it was. I remember playing for the third team in the village of Winscombe in Somerset when I was a schoolboy, a horrific experience. The men drank beer out of a watering can at half-time and kicked and punched and gouged at each other. Teeth were lost and noses bent and jaws broken. No-one could catch, but no-one cared. The game, in the professional era, is much improved.

But the amateurishness of the old days lives on at grounds around the country, where, in the dying light of a Saturday evening, players who have just finished a game mingle with each other and with the crowd. Nobody fears violence, and little children can wander safely around men as tall as oak trees.

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They can wear the scarves of either team, just as they have during the match, sitting next to each other in unsegregated stands. I remember once waiting by the pitch to have a word at Twickenham with my pal Matt Banahan, who then played for Bath. He’d taken so much time to sign autographs that the lights had been put out and the stewards, very politely (Matt is 6’7” and 17 stone) had to ask him to leave.

The thing that struck me was that Bath had performed badly that day, and it had been a disappointing result. It didn’t get him down, because Matt knew that this was a big day out for a lot of young lives and he had played a part in it.

You will see the same spirit at the World Cup over the next few weeks. Immense violence and huge decency, skill, fitness and bravery rewarded. No flinching, diving or dishonour.

That’s rugby. And if a home nation does win, let’s not ban football: let’s laugh in its face, and make a better choice.