The Daily Mirror really shouldn't try to do political history

Monday's edition claimed, in a desperate Andy Murray / Gordon Brown / let's-desperately-try-and-keep-the-Union-together-and-make-it-possible-for-Labour-to-eventually-get-back-in puffpiece, that "the blow to national pride" of England's defeat in the quarter-final of the 1970 World Cup against West Germany "was blamed on" Harold Wilson's election defeat.

Perhaps poor syntax on the part of the writer, but quite apart from the unlikely scenario of footballers' performances seriously being affected by an election result (and anyway, quite a few of them, even pre-Thatcher, would surely have been the sort of working-class-boys-made-good who voted Tory because they thought Labour would put them back where their fathers had been?) the slightest research could have told them that the match was played four days before the election, and that Wilson's defeat was blamed by many at the time and since on England's.

They really ought to stick to dredging up the Madeleine McCann episode and putting it on their front page when at least all their rivals are leading on this year's shitstorm ...