For supporters of rugby league — a game associated not with public schools but the towns of the post-industrial North — the arrival of the Conservative Party into its territory was a surprise. League had always been part of a working-class culture which was intrinsically Labour, played out across the coalfields of Lancashire and Yorkshire, in the weapon and shipbuilding plants of Cumbria and by the docks of Humberside. But when Brexit proved to be a reckoning for those areas, with the Conservatives vowing to see it through, the sport was inevitably drawn in.

This is how we ended up with Ann Widdecombe addressing a Labour club in the rugby-league heartland of Featherstone in early 2019. In an ex-mining town that had once looked to Arthur Scargill, she won cheers for attacking the “traitors in parliament” and the “bureaucrats in Brussels”. The only boos came when anyone mentioned the prospect of a “second referendum”. It was part of a political sea change. Featherstone’s MP, Jon Trickett, was one of the lucky survivors of the collapse of the Red Wall in 2019. But the gradual decline in his vote share over recent decades emphasises the disconnect between the party and the people. In 1997, Trickett won over 70% of the vote, making it a rock-solid New Labour area. By contrast, in 2019 his share was down to just 37%.

Labour politicians can no longer afford to take those voters for granted. Lisa Nandy, who represents another ex-mining rugby league town in Wigan, has since made the connection between sport and her constituents’ sense of place. In her book All In, she notes how almost every Labour club in Wigan has been demolished, how the once-beloved ground, Central Park, is now a Tesco.

For all the changes to society, however, rugby league stands firm in those areas as a focal point for working-class communities to come together. Despite operating in an ever harder financial climate, clubs remain the place where identities are forged, and community cohesion is harnessed. When Covid-19 hit, for instance, it was the clubs that were at the forefront of the organisational response — from co-ordinating welfare checks and running foodbanks to raising money for NHS services. When the Johnson Government ensured the game had a loan to keep operating when the doors were closed, Oliver Dowden said it was because “it has been the social glue holding communities together”.

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If there is one area that symbolises the historic importance of a team to a community then it is Featherstone Rovers. Often described as just a “set of traffic lights on the road from Wakefield to Pontefract”, the club has prided itself on punching above its weight by producing generations of international players — the likes of Jimmy Thompson, Paul Newlove and Zak Hardaker. For much of the 20th century, players did the same jobs, drank in the same pubs, lived on the same streets, and sent their kids to the same schools as the supporters who idolised them on the terraces. When a group of sociologists visited the area for the study Coal is Our Life, rugby league was judged alongside the pub and the cinema to be “the only institution bringing large numbers of people together”.

This organic community began to dissolve in the Eighties. Any town that was linked to coal-mining was hammered when the pit closure plan was initiated, and, during the miners’ strike, Featherstone became emblematic of the turmoil that was engulfing the region. League players picketed by day while those working in other industries were stopped and interrogated by the police as they went about their daily business. Wives of miners stopped fundraising for the club and started supporting each other instead. Rovers let striking miners in for free on the assumption that they would reimburse them when they were back at work. But the pits never did reopen. The community was broken up and people took on new jobs as labourers and taxi drivers. The local historian Ian Clayton watched on as a succession of building societies and well-established businesses were boarded up and broken into. Crime, which had never been a factor in the town’s day-to-day life, increased. “For the first time to my knowledge, I’ve known Featherstone folk pinching off one another,” Clayton wrote.

At the same time, rugby league looked set to abandon Featherstone, too. The sport’s attempt to come to terms with the settlement of the Eighties was the plan, fuelled by a mega broadcasting deal with BSkyB, to merge small clubs together and expand into the cities. “We have 35 clubs in terrible little, tiny areas all competing to get the same sponsors, the same people through the turnstiles, the same players,” argued Maurice Lindsay, who spearheaded the move. “Nostalgia”, he concluded, “does not pay the bills.” For the “expansionists” who wanted the game to grow and move into the cities, teams such as Featherstone were symbolic of the league’s parochialism and the “cloth cap” image that it wanted to distance itself from. A profitable future for the sport would come through big money and big media.

Lindsay tellingly likened it to Nigel Lawson’s financial “big bang”, allowing clubs to amalgamate like banks and building societies had. Others saw it as an attempt to change the image of the game. The veteran rugby league journalist Paul Fitzpatrick wrote that the sport could not hope to survive when it was “played in dumps and against a background of stark poverty”. But, in 1995, when Featherstone supporters were told that their club would merge with neighbours Castleford and Wakefield (to become Calder), it stirred deep emotions within them.

The resistance to the mergers was soon framed as a battle between the people and the elite. Supporters made protest signs — “Bought and Sold for Murdoch’s Gold,” read one — and came together in community halls and Labour clubs to orchestrate a campaign of protest. One, speaking at an anti-Calder meeting, declared rugby league is not a “commodity to be bought and sold by billionaires”. The “expansionists” framed the opponents as reactionaries who were unable to see how society and the marketplace around sports was changing. But revisiting those debates today, it is clear that the battle to conserve those identities was not just about the past. It was also about the future. For all that had been lost during the Eighties, there was hope that, through rugby league, their areas could one day be part of the national story again.

So, when Ian Clayton was invited on to the BBC to debate the mergers, he dreamed that “one day a woman would wake up in Toulouse one morning and turn round to her husband and say, ‘Do you fancy a weekend in Featherstone?’” His campaign even printed T-shirts which emphasised this philosophy, urging people to “Think Global – Act Local”. But due to the huge fan pressure, the rugby league mergers never happened. Instead, dreams of global expansion were traded for the preservation of heritage, and league continues to serve the same working-class communities that formed the game over 125 years ago. It was the same lesson that football learned when they tried to instigate the European Super League in 2021: when faced with a direct choice between cash and community, fans will pick community every time.

It’s a sporting simulacrum for the vote to leave the European Union. But, just as with Brexit, there is a clear economic trade-off when you focus on the local rather than the global market. Today, league clubs remain community assets but are increasingly irrelevant on the national stage. In the fierce battle to secure sponsorship and TV revenue, league increasingly arrives at the table with a weak hand. While the organisers of the Rugby World Cup forecasts that it will make €45 million this year, the league equivalent, hosted in England last autumn, failed to drum up much public interest. Had it not been subsidised by the British taxpayer it would have run at a significant loss.

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The lack of funds at the top of the game means that the sport is always battling for survival. Just last month in Featherstone, the local amateur club, the Lions, who run junior clubs, put out an appeal to raise money to fix craters and potholes, as well as rebuild their toilets and showers. The organiser admits that “the last thing our kids and wider community need is for our club to close due to financial reasons”. For now though, Featherstone on a matchday remains a place where the community can come together. It is the place where ex-players can meet in the clubhouse and reminisce about the “good old days”; where young people can sit, vape, and hang out together; where new parents can park their prams and let their children play.

As Britain navigates its post-Brexit landscape, the dilemma facing rugby league is not too dissimilar to the one facing our politicians. How can areas protect those community assets in an economy that has been dependent on market forces for so long? Brexit and the 2019 election put places such as Featherstone at the centre of the debate about Britain’s future and its identity. As we struggle to adapt to our new era, their communal spirit, powered by rugby league, might once again hold the key.

June and July are when the horse racing calendar reaches its peak, carnivalesque events which illustrate one of the great curiosities of English life: how so many social patterns are U-shaped — popular with the toffs at the top and the plebs at the bottom, with not much interest in between.

The most eventful day in the racing calendar is Ladies Day at Ascot, a term that dates back to an anonymous poem written in 1823 which declared: “Ladies’ Day… when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine.” Although this is the sport of kings, Ladies Day tends to be best known for the various drunken fights between women in expensive dresses, often while their menfolk lie passed out on the grass. This has become so frequent as to be almost part of English culture, like the Friday before Christmas where people are allowed to have a punch-up.

Horse racing sums up the point once made by the great Billy Connolly when he said: “The proper serious upper class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks. What I found when I was in the pub was the rich and the successful from millionaires’ row mixed very easily with the council house people — and it was the V-necked jumper Volvo mob who had the problem. They wondered why [the upper class] were talking to them fucking scrubbers.”

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The Army is the classic example of an institution popular at both ends of the social spectrum, with public school-educated Ruperts in the officers’ mess and squaddies in the ranks, still heavily recruited from poorer areas. Except during two world wars, no one in my family, bred by hundreds of years of reading-related short-sightedness and bourgeoise cowardice, has ever considered the military. It would be almost inconceivable for someone in the middle of the English class system to do so.

But that has always been the case. The late medieval satire Le roman de Renart le contrefait observed that: “When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”

Fighting was the original role of the aristocracy, and it was not until the 14^th century that rich merchants like Michael de la Pole — whose father rather vulgarly made his money in wool rather than stabbing someone while riding a horse — began to enter the highest ranks. Even in modern conflict the nobility has made an outsized sacrifice, with the great public schools losing hugely disproportionate numbers in the First World War. (Old Etonians suffered twice the average casualty rate.)

Big families are another marker of class, with those at each end of the socio-demographic index having the highest fertility. True aristocrats, just like true proletariats, are also more likely to spend a great deal of time with family members, and they are both more likely to give their children wacky names, whether it’s Prince, Rara or Zenia.

Their surnames are often hard to tell apart, too. During the recent European Championship, Birmingham MP Jess Philips tweeted: “My youngest’s question for tonight ‘why do footballers never have double-barrelled names?’”

It was interpreted as being a statement on the England heroes’ proletarian origins, yet it was a strange thing to write without checking — because countless English footballers have double-barrelled names, to such an extent that it’s a cliché. Double-barrelled names are a classic example of the class U-curve.

Today horse racing remains the great class uniter, but once upon a time there were a whole variety of “sports” — essentially animal torture — enjoyed both by toffs and peasants. As Ian Mortimer recalls in his entertaining book on the Regency period, the Westminster dog pit, where hounds would rip various other animals to pieces, was tremendously popular with both the upper classes and poor; when Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, the future tsar, came to London he absolutely loved it.

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Boxing was also a very upper-and-lower class sport, and fashionable gentleman known as “the Fancy” would attend London pugilist schools alongside scrawny cockneys. Poet Robert Southey said that “a boxing-match settles all disputes among the lower classes, and when it is over they shake hands, and are friends”, while the upper-class went for duelling instead.

Some aristocrats liked fighting so much they sought out the company of rough working men to give them a good scrap, among them Regency rake and eccentric, and Tory MP, “Mad” Jack Mytton. Mytton, a member of the Shropshire squirarchy, had attended Cambridge, where he drank 2,000 bottles of port and failed to graduate, before going on a Grand Tour and joining the Army. The perfect aristo.

Mytton was a great enthusiast of hunting, another popular sport among both ends of the spectrum, and when on one occasion a Welsh miner got in his way while out enjoying his favourite pastime, he dismounted and challenged him to a fight. The two men punched each other continually during 20 rounds of bare-knuckle boxing and when the Welshmen surrendered the Tory gave him 10 shillings for his trouble. A fun day was had by all.

Similarly, tattoos have historically been popular among aristocrats and the urban poor. Edward VII had a cross and George V a dragon, which he got while in the Navy, while Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake on her wrist. Tattoos are now ubiquitous and classless, but people’s social status can often still be marked out by fashion, an area where working-class men in their 20s have often aped the aristocratic look; the most famous case of this is Burberry, the brand which went from being a very Sloane Ranger/Country Life outfit to ubiquitous among football hooligans at one point.

But then perhaps the most obvious — and largely forgotten — product of upper-lower class cooperation is football itself. In Beastly Fury, his account of the birth of the national sport, Richard Sanders wrote how the football came about from a mixture of (extremely violent) public-school culture and peasant folk traditions. The game had been popular in medieval England, repeatedly banned as it invariably ended with disorder, until the custom was largely suppressed in the early Victorian period. (Remnants of the old game are still played in a few villages in England, if that’s your kind of thing.)

The aristocracy tolerated these anarchic events but the new industrialists were hostile, as were the trade unions, one union leader denouncing football as “barbarous recklessness and supreme folly”. They especially disliked how upper-class men would stand on the sidelines cheering it on as all great fun, one complaining “Your ‘Betters’ have been foremost in this fête, hallooing you like brute dogs to the strife”. Shrovetide football, often accompanied by widespread violence, was banned by middle-class campaigners who disliked the “barbarous and disgusting play of football”, as one called it.

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But the rural poor loved it, as did the toffs, with variations of football surviving in the great public schools where “the ancient folk sport was given a new lease of life in the mid-nineteenth century when it came close to dying out among the common people”.

From the late 1830s there was a football scene at Cambridge University, the only problem being that all the public schools played different rules, some vastly so (Rugby especially). Football came to be pioneered by the likes of former Harrow schoolboys John and Charles Alcock, yet the real hotbed of the game was in Sheffield, home to the world’s oldest surviving football club; Sanders suggests that this was because the local folk game had lingered in this part of Yorkshire in the hill villages of Penistone, Thurlstone and Holmforth. “Association football was now essentially a fusion of the Charterhouse/Westminster-influenced game played in London and the more folk-influenced game that had emerged from Sheffield.”

Eventually football would become a heavily working-class sport, only becoming truly classless from the 1990s, but its origins lie in Connolly horseshoe theory. Unlike rugby, however, football didn’t split along class lines, because the upper-class FA were willing to accept professionalism, whereas the RFA refused, leading northern teams to form the Rugby League. Significantly, Sanders attributes this to the aristocratic confidence of football’s founders. “It may well be that this reflected the newer, lower-status public schools many of the men running rugby had attended,” he wrote, “they were less secure socially than the Eton and Harrow men who ran football and therefore less comfortable compromising.”

And this has always been the case. Aristocrats and poor can act like each other, dress like each other or indulge in the same pastimes, partly because no one is going to mistake them. As Scott Alexander explained in his seminal essay Right is the New Left, most fashions try to signal that someone is a notch above their real status, while avoiding giving the signal of being the status immediately under.

But you’re never going to be mistaken for someone several notches above or below. A few children now have double-barrelled names but one reason it has not proved so popular among progressive middle-class parents may be the signal; if you’re the first person in your family to go to university and you’re now middle class, no one is going to mistake you for a double-barrelled aristocrat who lives on an estate; but they may mistake you for a double-barrelled struggling single mum who lives on an estate.

We also tend to resent or dislike those closest to us in the pecking order. Despite the folksy image, Jess Phillips, like many prominent Labour MPs, comes from the comfortable ranks of the bourgeoisie, her mother having been a senior NHS administrator. Their hereditary class enemies are the traditionally Tory-voting members of the aristocracy and squirearchy just above them — the double-barrelled brigade — and many a political or journalistic worldview was formed by class resentments at Oxford and Cambridge, against those toffs from the Bullingdon Club. 

But while people are more likely to feel hostility to people immediately above or below them on the social spectrum, those more distant may feel either irrelevant or a curiosity. We don’t compare our lives to people unlike us, nor feel our status threatened. That might explain why people across the country continue to vote for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, almost caricature Old Etonians, because they feel that like them, they are properly fucking nuts.

The best exchanges seeped out because they were too good not to be shared with a wider audience. We’re not talking Wildean levels of wit here — not least because of the obscene nature of most sledging — but cricket-lovers will know of incidents such as the one when Australia (the kings of sledging) were playing South Africa in a crucial match during the 1999 World Cup.

Steve Waugh was batting for Australia when the South African fielder Herschelle Gibbs missed a chance to catch him. “You’ve just dropped the World Cup,” Waugh is said to have told him.

That was 20 years ago. If Waugh were uttering those words today, there’s a decent chance the world would hear them. Just as the world heard what Joe Root, the England captain, said to the West Indian fast bowler, Shannon Gabriel. During the Test match in St Lucia, it seems Gabriel cast what he clearly intended as a slur. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” Root responded as the two players locked horns.

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We know this is what Root said because a microphone positioned nearby picked it up. For Sky TV, which is showing the Test series, the incident will have been a tremendous bonus. After all, how many more subscriptions might they sell if viewers think that the action is going to include heated verbal exchanges between players?

Like millions of other cricket fans, I was riveted by what went on between Gabriel and Root. It was confrontation of a quite different kind from what was happening when Gabriel was bowling and Root was batting — a glimpse into a side of Test cricket we never normally see and all the more fascinating for it.

It’s the same — but better — with the Six Nations rugby tournament, currently in full flow. For some years the referees have been mic’d up and TV viewers have been able to hear what they are saying — to players and also to their fellow officials.

The best moments are when a player needs a telling-off. “I’ve spoken to you before about rugby values,” I heard the referee Nigel Owens say to a player who’d transgressed during the recent England-France match at Twickenham. I thought, great, we’re going to hear an entire speech from Owens about the sport’s higher ideals. I’d have been quite happy to sit back while the match took on the form of an improvised docu-drama.

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Rarely does a rugby player demur when he is hauled up before the ref. But that’s rugby for you. They don’t give the ref an earful like a footballer might. They’ll stand there often quite meekly. When those not involved in the incident arrive on the scene, the referee might give them short shrift. “Go away!” I heard the referee Wayne Barnes tell someone during another recent Six-Nations encounter.

It feels like eavesdropping. And that perhaps is where the problem with on-field microphones lies.

Sure, they’re great news for viewers, but what does it mean for the players to know that something said during the heat of battle might be broadcast to millions? The pitch is, after all, their workplace. Aren’t they entitled to some privacy?

During the press conference at the end of the day’s play, in which Root had uttered his now famous riposte to Gabriel, the England captain tried to play the incident down. “It’s Test cricket,” Root said. “He’s an emotional guy trying to do everything he can to win a Test match. Sometimes people say things on the field that they might regret, but they should stay on the field.”

Of course Root wants things to stay on the field. It’s bad enough having to take responsibility for scoring runs off a fearsome bowler like Gabriel. Plus Root has to captain the team. Must he also be responsible for anything he says that a microphone picks up?

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The publicity around this incident has, naturally, been entirely beneficial for Root. His enlightened attitude has been seized upon. Just as Andy Murray has become everyone’s favourite male feminist, Root is now rightly lauded for challenging homophobia and showing that the sporting arena isn’t quite as unreconstructed as many people would have you believe. But I’m not sure that’s the point.

Because while I can’t believe Root is unhappy about his new-found reputation, is this how he would have chosen to be elevated to spokesman on such matters? If indeed he would have chosen to go down that path at all? Sport amplifies everything. It’s the ultimate metaphor for life, and what gets said on the field of play takes on a lasting power. It resonates.

If microphones oblige players to clam up, I wonder what that might mean for the nature of the sport itself. The sports environment is about nothing, if it is not about intensity of engagement. Should sportspeople now be expected to stay passionate enough to win, but calm enough not to say anything untoward? I’m not sure that the vast sums many sportspeople are paid, or the fact that they might be representing the nation, puts them under that much of an obligation.

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It has made me feel quite nostalgic, and I’ve been considering those more innocent, pre-microphone days. Back in 1902, during a Test match between England and Australia, the England batsman George Hirst is reputed to have told his partner Wilfred Rhodes that they would win a tight match by “getting them in singles”. The quote has entered cricket folklore.

Similarly, an incident that took place 82 years later, during the Italia 90 World Cup, has entered football folklore. It’s the semi-final between England and West Germany, and England’s Paul Gascoigne has received the booking that will rule him out of the final. Enter Gary Lineker as Gascoigne stands there distraught. Lineker looks to the manager Bobby Robson at the side of the pitch. “Have a word,” we can clearly lip-read Lineker saying.

As with George Hirst, it was a wonderfully human, natural moment – not performed for the benefit of the microphone. And that is something you can be sure will start happening once those of a more exhibitionist disposition on the sports field realise they have the ear of the world.

The most human, natural moments are often also the most private. Maybe in sport they should stay that way.

The appeal of the contest is obvious enough to those of us who love it; the sheer ferocity of the encounters engages the senses like nothing else. It is not just the bone-jarring collisions, the sweat and grunt and often blood, that are so compelling; when a match flowers into a fast-running move with wonderfully skilful kicking, passing and catching that is when the beauty of the spectacle catches the throat.

There is much else to admire: physical courage and the admirable way in which players accept admonition and punishment meted out by the referees – so different from the petulance too often on display in football. But it is not just these virtues – which embody the spirit of the game – that are so appealing; there is something much deeper that binds the players and the fans. A bond forged by a tradition that stretches back five generations to the mid-Victorian era and which legitimises intense feelings of sporting patriotism.

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The Six Nations started out as the Home Nations tournament, first organised in 1883 for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. It wasn’t until 1910 that France was invited to compete, and it took another 90 years until the sixth country – Italy – was invited in. So, in the beginning it was a family affair. The phrase Home Nations, somehow so redolent of the Victorian era, was in common usage in politics throughout the 19^th century and tells us something about the way the four component countries saw themselves.

Even allowing for the incipient nationalist movements that were taking shape (leading to Ireland’s departure from the UK in 1922) the phrase captures the sense of kinship that people in all four nations acknowledged. And to a large extent still do. Commentators will use the phrase in coming days and – here’s the salient point – it never, ever, includes France or Italy.

Nothing binds nations together more strongly than the kind of unselfconscious cameraderie that is on display on match days in the Six Nations. It is an organic thing, a grassroots outgrowth from more than a 130 years of competition, something never spelt out but merely understood; national rivalries fiercely, but joyously, celebrated. At this level it utterly transcends politics and underscores how different are relations between our ‘home nations’ and everyone else in the world.

Not that rugby exists in a separate, politics-free, reality but the sport has shown – particularly in Ireland – an uplifting capacity to rise above the most trying circumstances. Brian O’Driscoll, the legendary Ireland centre, recently made an insightful TV documentary on the history of the Ireland team and how it continued to select an all-Ireland 15 even when the Troubles were at their height.

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At a time when cross-border authorities of any description were vanishingly rare, the Irish Rugby Football Union still selected Irishmen serving in the British military; JJ McCoy, a regular team member for five years in the 1980s, was a serving Royal Ulster Constabulary officer. He records that no one ever gave him any grief about his twin vocations and that he stood proudly for the Irish national anthem Amhrán na bhFiann without any sense of inner conflict.

McCoy is the Homes Nations word made flesh. An individual in whom the apparently irreconcilable contradictions of his multiple allegiances dissolved in the medium of his Irish sporting identity. There is no short-cut to this kind of relationship: it is the fruit of shared history. Few fans among the watching millions will feel that same sense of kinship with other, merely political, unions. The EU, for instance, which has barged its way, so unhelpfully, into the relationship between Britain and Ireland under cover of the ‘hard-border’ imbroglio.

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But the politicians’ squabbles over the detail of trading arrangements will not disturb the permanent sub-strata of fellow-feeling among the four tribes. For many of us Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England remain family; agreed we have our quarrels – that’s families for you – but the blood ties still count. Saying this is not to disparage the relationship between France and Italy and ourselves. They are honoured rivals too; but it is not quite the same.

And so to the prospects for this year’s tournament. For those who wish to see them in such terms there will be matches where current politics might give an extra edge to the game; Italy vs France, for instance, where this year the Garibaldi Cup will be played against a background of exceptionally poor relations between Rome and Paris.

And what about Ireland vs England? Saturday’s match between these two hardly needs a political dimension to enhance its importance; Ireland, their confidence sky-high after beating the All Blacks in the autumn, are clear favourites to retain the title this year. But carrying the ‘favourites’ tag is something Ireland have not always found helpful.

And if there is one predictable thing about the Six Nations it is the un-predictability of the outcomes. This year – with this autumn’s World Cup in Japan looming – all the teams will be looking  to make a successful Six Nations campaign the launch-pad for an assault on the world title. Wales, France and Scotland are hardly make-weights (the same, sadly cannot be said of Italy). Any of them are well capable of beating Ireland or England. Wales, in particular, could be the surprise package this time round. For myself my heart is with England but, as an Anglo-Scot, I shall celebrate any victory by Scotland. In fact I find I can take pleasure in the success of any of the Home teams. Family life – it’s complicated.