Keys, Gray and dinosaurs

Yes, I know, four months, &c, &c, &c.

But cast your mind back, if you can bear it, to August 1992. Working-class culture and unity as a political force had just received its final defeat - indeed, now it was not only socialism but social democracy that was decisively beaten - but one important aspect of working-class culture, which had teetered on the brink of oblivion through the years of squalor and violence which were a natural consequence first of the working class's abandonment of its side in the Butskellite bargain and then of the revenge destruction that followed, was BACK! Not only was it back but it was reborn and reinvented for a new era. A new, ostentatiously classless and mid-Atlantic face of football was, it had to be accepted even by the most fervent socialists considering what we'd been through in the previous decade, the only way out.

But what we were already seeing was the purloining of a genuinely progressive agenda by short-term capitalists who, only a few years earlier, would have been happy to see the sport collapse into oblivion. The game was, in truth, saved not by the Murdoch organisation but by the strong efforts of the fanzine movement, the well-organised mobilisation against the Thatcher government's identity card scheme, the genuine public sympathy and goodwill and desire to save such a significant, embedded part of British life which spread, quite unexpectedly and quicker than most newspapers sensed, after the "never again" moment of Hillsborough, the impetus for reconstruction set out in the Taylor Report, and a couple of fortuitous moments of good luck for the game spread entirely through terrestrial television - the Liverpool-Arsenal match six weeks after Hillsborough which convinced the residual aldermen of the Football League, and many others besides, that the game and dramatic live television could be the most natural bedfellows, and England's well-documented World Cup campaign of 1990.

All these occurred at a time when Sky was struggling to stay afloat, and showed no interest in football other than as co-owners of the original Eurosport. When the triumvirate that remained unbroken until this week - Richard Keys, Andy Gray and Martin Tyler - all deserted an ITV knowing that its original role could not last, they in fact joined the Sports Channel of BSB, the IBA's doomed attempt to keep the old broadcasting values alive in the new world. This organisation's very name, like most of the positive and progressive forces without which Sky would never have had a product to market at all, has rarely if ever been mentioned by Sky, for the simple reason that - like the overwhelmingly socialist fanzines and equally heartfelt left-wing campaigns against both the Tebbitists and the unashamedly lumpenproletariat thugs who posed an equal and remarkably similar threat to football's future at that time (what were the former, ever, but a more "respectable" version of the latter?) - it is politically embarrassing to acknowledge, not least because Richard Keys spent those years working for TV-am, the Daily Mail on screen and the place where the organised working class decisively lost its stake in broadcasting. The truth is that, just as the Labour Party was already in a strong electoral position on 12th May 1994, football was recovering anyway without Sky, and would have continued to do so - and in a direction that would have maintained the best elements of the old game while, if anything (because far more left-wing and democratic in the true, non-Blairite sense) more determined to throw out the worst aspects, especially the attitudes that Keys & Gray never even attempted to lose.

As their purloining for ultra-capitalist means of reforms that could never have happened without deep-rooted left-wing convictions gathered pace, Sky benefited initially from the fact that there was still a residual Reithianism at the BBC and a residual "right-on" stance at Channel 4, which gave them a sheen of rebellion and outsiderdom that they didn't deserve. The undeniable technical advancement for the time of their early Premier League coverage, coupled with the unprecedented commercialism of their presentation (mainly derived, as were many other aspects of their coverage, from the Channel 4 coverage of American football which had reached its peak at our own game's nadir), made veteran pundits such as Jimmy Hill, who twenty years earlier had reinvented football coverage just as much as Sky would do, and especially Saint & Greavsie, who quickly disappeared from ITV's shrivelled coverage, seem how Keys & Gray seem now - stupid, irrelevant old men. But this, as has been made brutally clear this week, was only on the superficial level of appearances. The actual attitudes and assumptions remained as backward and outmoded as they had ever been, rendered more so by the very force - global capitalism - which made them falsely appear to be different.

If Keys & Gray's neo-imperialist arrogance could very briefly claim to be set against a residually social democratic or paternalist broadcasting establishment, this was only the case at the very beginning of the Premier League era, for a number of forces rapidly came together to ensure that Sky's values gained more and more influence over the established broadcasters. Halfway through the first season of Sky's Whole New Ball Game, Channel 4 began to sell its own advertising airtime, effectively eroding the window of opportunity which for the previous decade had given Guardian values a mass television platform. The new system of ITV introduced at the same time decisively ended the era when even the most populist face of British TV had to be backed up with serious and unashamed aspirations to public service respectability. And even the BBC, faced with the unappealing alternative of the "Himalayan Option" which would have removed forever its claim to universality and confined it to an ever-diminishing Reithian ghetto (and of course destroy the outlet which was soon to spawn Britpop), began to play more and more by the rules of the market. Moreover, the cultural and political Left in the mid-90s decisively abandoned many of the principles that had guided the likes of the old Channel 4 and the fanzine movement, and began to accept if not actively celebrate neoliberal politics, a crude success-orientated attitude to popular culture, and social views (with wafer-thin justifications of "irony") far closer to those displayed at Molineux last Saturday than to anything that could be described as progressive. Keys & Gray were setting the agenda for an age. While it was always acknowledged that, say, the "New Football Writing" of the mid-90s came from a different cultural starting point, they were widely seen as at least allies of convenience for such a movement to an extent that, like much else about that era, is truly shaming when looked back on today.

The rebels, just like the Blairite rock'n'rollers to whom they became so close, had become the rulers. They had conquered the awestruck heights of British broadcasting; the whole system was being reshaped in their image. Incompetent and ill-thought-out attempts to dethrone them - such as ITV's idiotic attempt to develop digital terrestrial television as a low-rent competitor to Sky, and to build its own pay-TV sports channel around the continuing Football League and lesser Champions' League matches - only made them stronger, and made their competitors ever more laughable, caught frustratedly between the stools of erstwhile public service duopoly and hamfisted attempts to find a deregulated niche. No matter that huge numbers of the population never had, and have still never had, Sky; it became impossible to live without its influence unless you chose to isolate yourself from all mass media. The result was the inevitable outcome of those whose sole definition was how "anti-establishment" they were becoming the unquestioned, unquestionable rulers; like their counterparts in Blairite (and of course latterly Cameronite) rock music, they became drunk on power, so certain of their position that it never occurred to them to think before they spoke, or to think very much at all. All the time, right up to this week, the pretence remained that, just as Keys & Gray had moved the presentation of football on from the 1980s, they had also moved it on in terms of underlying attitudes and values. What really died this week is an important sustaining myth of the Britain of the last 15 years.

On an internal level for Sky themselves, the challenge now is to reinvent their own coverage in the same way they reinvented football coverage generally when Keys & Gray were the fresh young faces. No doubt, with the immense political and cultural power they have developed, they will succeed. But for the rest of us a more interesting point is this: if the faces of Sky throughout its existence are now recognised and accepted to be the very definition of dinosaurs, does that not show that the people they got rich by taunting with that description simply for daring to be socialist were never anything of the kind, merely people who had the temerity to hold to unfashionable ideas? If these most potent faces of 90s and 00s neoliberalism stand discredited and ruined, just as their creed is taking a more extreme and dangerous form in government than ever before, that could be an unexpectedly potent way back for the rest of us.

At any rate, a delusion died this week, a delusion that has shaped the second half of my life so far just as assuredly as the different (though related) delusions of Thatcherism shaped the first. Richard Keys and Andy Gray have fallen on their swords by the crudest rules of trial by media. To destroy the myths of neoliberalism which they so deeply embodied will be a far deeper challenge.

Religious conservatives and religious conservatives

As usual, I have left it until the Pope has left Britain to put forward my opinions on the matter. Let it be known that I have no respect whatsoever for the Catholic Church as an institution. I regard its record of child abuse and other abuses of power as a disgrace, its insistence on celibacy of priests dangerous in the extreme (and, like face-covering and other "Islamic" practices, wholly unjustified by history or the original religious texts), its refusal to accept the ordination of women an equally extreme example of what happens when the defence of a narrow set of societal norms, which have little in themselves to do with religion, against the rest of the world becomes far more important than religious belief itself (again, the parallels with Islam should be clear to everyone outside the worst newspapers in the world). It might well have been different had its hierarchy not run in fear from the full connotations of Vatican II almost as soon as they had been opened, but as the Catholic Church stands I can barely think of a good word to say for it.

So why do I feel slightly uneasy at the tone of some (only some) of the dismissals of the Pope from people I usually respect and agree with? Not because I disagree with them as such, but because I am worried that, out of a wholly understandable desire not to overlap with the kneejerk bigots of the right-wing press, certain people who regard themselves as critics of religious conservatism do not criticise it in all its forms (the only legitimate position on the matter) but are misguidedly soft on religious conservatism when it is practised by people whose religions were imported from the Middle East rather more recently than Christianity, and are willing to play games with people who, if they had power outside their current fiefdoms (which I think is highly unlikely, but not necessarily impossible), would be at least as hostile to the cultural norms of left-liberalism as the Catholic Church, probably more so, and are steeped in a tradition that is much harder to reconcile with left-liberalism than mainstream Christianity, which for all its differences on moral issues shares a more similar grounding in literature and thought than many on both sides are willing to admit.

Oh, of course, I know how natural it feels to want to defend anything the Mail bashes - a letter in that paper at least 13 years ago is the sole reason why I like the Weymouth & Portland council offices infinitely more than they deserve. I know how much they poison everything. I wish the mainstream right in the UK had not been so damaged by its Thatcherite realignment towards virtually uncritical support of Israel, which leaves religious conservatives condemning other religious conservatives - destroying what might otherwise be a very real and natural alliance, if only of convenience - and puts left-liberals in an almost impossible position. And of course, the Express's "MUSLIM PLOT TO KILL POPE" headline was a disgrace to journalism even by their standards. I just feel that it should be conceded that a certain number of people will always want the security and certainty of religious conservatism (note: not wanting it yourself, just recognising the human condition) and that, where rival forms of backwardness are concerned, it might be better to keep a hold on the Christian nurse, because the alternative is a far greater threat to liberal values. Trying to wish out of existence the fact that there are people like that, who have such desires, is a form of deluded utopianism which, as usual with such things, can have deeply counter-productive ends, the opposite of its undeniably progressive aims.

As I say, I endorse and agree with the criticisms of the Catholic hierarchy as dangerously backward and counter-productive where any kind of social progress is concerned; I simply want the same criticisms to be unashamedly aired against certain aspects of Islam (especially when they are really, as with Christian fundamentalism, politics rather than religion). If it is made clear that the criticism is born out of a defence of liberal values, rather than fear of "foreigners" and "outsiders", the right-wing press will want nothing to do with it, and might even rediscover the pre-Thatcher Arabist Toryism which makes far more sense than their current position. But until criticism of religious conservatives is equal and unambiguous - criticising them because they are religious conservatives, not for any other petty and culturally specific reason - I regret to say that I will suspect, albeit from a wholly different starting point, that there may be more truth in Peter Hitchens' suspicion - that extreme atheism is really a cultural cringe at the thought of one's childhood memories and pre-pop cultural inheritance, rather than a genuinely thought-out ideology - that I would like to believe there is. I am - on balance - an agnostic, rather than an atheist. It's the biggest difference in the world, and it doesn't make you a "Christian in denial" as both Hitchens brothers would probably think. It just makes you reasoned and tolerant.

Radio considered as a metaphor for a nation: part 32413

So Capital Radio - a London behemoth for 37 years - is coming to large swathes of the rest of the UK on FM. In reality, it's merely the logical conclusion of a process that's been under way for two decades. Like the post-war mixed economy model that created them, the original ILR stations - the ones that routinely interspersed "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" and "Blue Monday" with plugs for jumble sales - were, for all their positive attributes, uneasy hybrids constantly being pushed in two conflicting, irreconcilable directions. One of these decisively triumphed over the other with the Act of 20 years ago, and within half a decade most of what existed in the commercial sector was "local" only in the most theoretical sense, coming from interchangeable buildings in interchangeable towns and playing interchangeable music. The development of British commercial radio - instigated by Heath, stopped in its tracks for a while by Labour and the Annan Committee - was flawed and compromised on multiple levels, but it could not have been anything else because to get on the air at all, even 30 years ago, it was necessary to appeal to local elites, quasi-feudal fiefdoms whose power even as late as that now seems literally unbelievable. The quasi-nationalisation of commercial FM pop radio in Britain seems to sum up the final death of restricted, small-scale local semi-capitalism, the point when the last link (outside, perhaps, a few unrepresentative fringe areas, many outside England where the rules may still be different) between pop and the old structures it used to have to fit itself around is symbolically broken for good.

Inevitably, the very people who lament the coming of unbridled Top 40 commercial radio on FM, with no lingering ties to place and history, are very often the same people who yearned for precisely that kind of radio (the offshore stations were every bit as short-term capitalist and dismissive of all other interests as Global Radio is, the only difference was that the political consensus then didn't approve of such things) during their formative years, usually some point between Suez and the coming of the new capitalism, roughly 1956 to 1984. For all they moaned about the "communist" tactics of the Wilson government against the offshore stations, and lamented the poor reception of Radio Luxembourg, they'd have been secretly repulsed had the British state embraced and celebrated pop music, and given them multiple commercial networks plus a BBC equivalent. Had such a thing happened back then, most of these future Thatcher voters would have been exposed as establishmentarians in disguise, at least as right-wing as their parents, and that would never have done. The old restrictions were deceptively convenient for the boomers to the extent that they gave them a platform to define themselves as "rebellious" and "anti-establishment" far beyond their true status as such on the issues that really mattered.

As pop has become the establishment culture to which all seeking power must conform (Brown's real undoing; we're just too close to it to see it yet) the more intelligent and thoughtful of those raised between the collapse of British power and the advent of naked capitalism in the UK may well feel, as I do, disillusioned with pop as a direct result of the Blairite degradation of the political process. But they are outnumbered by those who merely wish for the old restrictions to be continued as a means of covering their tracks - anything to avoid facing how right-wing and kneejerk they actually are, anything to avoid dealing with the fact that they are the masters now. Most of the rest of Europe has had national commercial FM pop radio for years, and in many ways it makes sense for Britain to follow, and use digital methods to fill the gaps; the only reason it hasn't had this sort of radio until now is deep-rooted official inertia (the continental equivalents of Radios 3 and 4 manage to take up far less of the spectrum than their BBC counterparts) and the fact that the decision-makers when the national commercial licences were given out in the pre-Blair early '90s were still of a wholly different generation. But the further institutionalisation of Britain as a deregulated quasi-American economy - everything the ILR anoraks wished for when they were young - unsettles that generation on multiple levels; quite apart from finally exposing them as the self-serving right-wingers they've been for practically half a century, it makes bad pop sound, for the first time, exactly as bad as it is. For every "Good Vibrations" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" the offshore stations played vast quantities of boring banality which, in itself, was and is no better and no worse than most of what the new Capital will play. It's just that the old romanticism of scarcity made bad pop sound good. Now it has to stand up for and of itself, and within the orthodoxies of Anglo-American capitalism it isn't pretty. Now, more than ever, we have to look elsewhere.

John Major and the law of unintended consequences

We all know the horrible tawdriness of the Mandelson and especially Blair memoirs. We all know, unless we are actually Blairites ourselves, that the loss of faith in pop music and pop culture feels like the loss of faith in God after the First World War must have done, and every bit as emotionally painful even as we know it is the only possible way. We may not know that John Major's "long shadows on county grounds" speech of April 1993 was the most important British political speech of the 1990s and the starting point for the Cameronite taunting of Brown. But it was arguably the former and definitely the latter, because without it the Blairites would never have had an instantly-understood basis for their reduction of politics to playground taunts about their opponents' cultural backgrounds rather than actual policy and ideology - the very tactic that was eventually used so cynically against Labour (which is why I can never take seriously Blairite complaints against it).

The actual context of the speech, as with most universally-recognised soundbites, has long since been forgotten if it was ever really known by most: its intention was to convince the Europhobes who Major famously called "bastards" that the traditions they claimed to love would not be threatened by further integration into the EU. That both Major and his supposed enemies completely ignored the much greater role of American influence in eroding that world need not be gone into again. But for the first year after it was made, I don't remember it being quite as famous and widely quoted as it became later, because there was no need for it to be - Labour policy under John Smith was sufficiently different from Tory policy, and the party significantly serious in its approach, that there was enough genuine ideological contrast and division between the two parties for Labour not to need to resort to ill-thought-out trivialities.

It was only once Blair had taken over, and dropped most of the policies that seriously distinguished Labour from the Tories, that the speech became a legend which almost overnight replaced proper politics in this country. The Blairites had to mock Major on those criteria alone, and for his not knowing about Oasis and the Spice Girls, and for his being old and grey, because they had ceased to be a genuine alternative to the Tories in any meaningful way. When Major desperately dribbled in 1996 that "our pop culture rules the world" (a blatant post-imperial lie of course: at the core of the EU at that time, the Backstreet Boys were bigger than Oasis) they thought they had achieved their greatest possible victory. To hear Major, impotent and destroyed, gibbering words like that was far more important than hearing him admit that Thatcherite ideas on the economy and society had been wrong - they would have been actively repulsed had he ever conceded that (as a social traditionalist such as he claimed to be should have), because in some ways the Blairites were more Thatcherite than Major; certainly the last thing they'd have wanted was to see any Tory admit that the mass privatisation of the mind had been a mistake, because that would have killed the whole Blairite myth before it even started.

Without that 1993 speech, the Blairites might well have found something else to put in place of serious politics and ideological differences between parties, but it would surely have been much harder, and had they failed to find such an easy stick to beat Major with, might they not have dropped most policies that were even social democratic, let alone socialist? We will, alas, never know. But as these profound and dangerous things happened, they were cynically hidden behind the facade of Knebworth, itself a perfect setting for the collapse of serious left-wing thought, being a once-crumbling old pile whose aristocratic owners had saved themselves from penury in the '70s via Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Genesis. A generation was conned and lied to. A generation - mine - grew up thinking that taunting opponents for not knowing enough about celebrities was a substitute for real politics. Some of them - unforgivably - even thought there was something left-wing about it. And then a Tory clique - an Etonian-led one, at that - used exactly the same criteria to taunt a Labour prime minister, and Blair very clearly sees nothing wrong with it.

If my generation ever had a reckoning, it is now.

That long

Today, the day I moved into this house is precisely as long ago - sixteen years minus twelve days - as Jim Callaghan's announcement that there would be no October 1978 election was on the day of our one-way journey from Waterloo.

I did not then know the full implications of what had happened at that time, but I already sensed a strange mirage shortly before I was born, a mysterious and unknowable lost universe of the recent past even without real knowledge of the deeper context. I knew it from daytime BBC2 reruns, bleak late nights of Radio 2 - the products of the very same quieter, unmarketised BBC which died forever the summer we moved, precisely halfway between then and now. "Forever Autumn" - a song I would hear in public in the summer of 2007, just as that very same scenario was being repeated in my own time, and would be torn apart by more than ever - to me brought on uncontrollable versions of a permanently changed landscape, hidden years I could not yet begin to understand. In the gaping rooms of the empty house we arrived in, they almost single-handedly kept me going, because I knew, albeit only at some vague, unconscious level, the changes had been further consolidated, taken to another, more total level, that very summer - Blair had come, Birt had successfully taken the precise opposite of the "Himalayan Option", Potter and Jarman had gone, Tarantino had beaten Kieslowski at Cannes. On several important levels, all remaining resistance within the official political and media structures of Britain to market fundamentalism had been wiped out in a matter of months, as had official belief in a European cultural consensus which is still wrongly considered a force in the present day and attacked as "imperialist" by some of the anti-Mail single-issue blogs (whose writers, admirable as their criticism of those odious newspapers is, are still often too culturally supportive of the real modern-day imperialists). I knew something of huge importance had happened, but I couldn't work out what it was yet - all I could do was retreat into another private world that seemed immensely remote, almost like my own private August 1914, which was far more similar to the moment I was living through than I could possibly have understood at the time.

Perhaps for those born shortly after 1994 the moment before they entered the world is already developing a similar exoticism which they cannot yet understand. Perhaps for those being born now, 2010 will eventually take on a similar mythic potency as the moment the changes begun at the end of the 1970s, and accelerated in several crucial fields in the mid-1990s, began their final phase, the moment the complete, final obliteration of any trace of the British public sphere (and perhaps of Britain itself, as a state) began.

We cannot yet know. But today's Pick of the Pops - on the very same Radio 2 which, in the summer of 1994, still played the Dam Busters March in the middle of a weekday - by sheer coincidence expressed and spoke of everything. Winton opining that he thought Foreigner's "Cold As Ice", an ugly, jarring opener, had been a bigger hit (of course: he has been brainwashed), Cerrone's putative quasi-master-race that nonetheless seems wholly sympathetic (and an unconsciously well-timed, on the 43rd anniversary of the moment when Wilson unwittingly begat boomer Thatcherism, mention of Kenny Everett), Voyage's unequivocal EUtopia (the full 15 minutes may be pop's pinnacle, full stop), Renaissance at the very height of the Long Mynd (and how much we should all wish "Follow You Follow Me" had been another "Northern Lights", a pop moment in isolation by a prog band none of whom ever charted again), "If The Kids Are United" (a deeply, profoundly counter-revolutionary song, which irreconcilably called for social unity yet wilfully threw off the legacy of 1945: there is no real difference between its particular refusal of Butskellism and the Thatcherite version, or between the social conservatism of the Sham Army belief that, say, Magazine weren't for "people like us" and the age-old lumpen proletariat that reading and learning weren't), "Dancing in the City" (whose best moment, I think now, is Kit Hain's slowed, ominous final "tonight", which wholly undermines the celebration - which, throughout the song, might as easily have turned into a wake - and strongly hints at storms coming), "Forever Autumn" more final than ever, "Substitute" wholly untainted by apartheid or ABBA copyism.

And, of course, Grease and "Three Times a Lady" to remind us of who and what actually won.

It's Sunday now. I haven't just lived here that long, but longer. Somehow, Cameron's final phase of destruction seems that much more omnipresent than it did on Friday. My own personal Rubicon has been crossed. This is what Peter Hammill meant the year I was born when he wrote "Fogwalking".

Auberon Waugh wrote in the Spectator of 2nd September 1978 that capitalism was dead in Britain.

That's why "From East to West" is greater than anything with Tony Blair's electric guitars on it. That's why I'm sitting here now. That's why white pop, now, is unsalvageable. But it's also why time will be my ultimate fascination until my own is over, and why I still want to believe that there is, somewhere, a parallel universe akin to the one the freed children dance into in the final scenes of Lost Hearts and Moondial, where Voyage are more revered than Dylan, more famous than GaGa.

Don't mind me. I'll leave the house again, some time soon. But this is my justification. This is the reason. This is why I didn't die. I'll keep going, through whatever is to come.

Sea Songs makes a brief transition into Mailwatch

In one breath, Peter Hitchens moans that Britain is now "a subject province of a continental empire".

In the next, he comments that while travelling recently in a European country, he was unable to change British currency into local money because it was "an exotic currency".

I rather suspect he is referring to Turkey here, but even by his / the Mail titles' standards, this is an astonishing level of self-contradiction. If Britain is ever again to have a proper, globally recognised currency, it has two choices. Sadly, I suspect Hitchens would rather see us dollarise. And then go on, in the same breath, about being forced to listen to pop music. Never has the stench of hypocrisy been uglier.

The sad thing is that the case for Europe can arguably be made more convincingly by cultural conservatives than by the likes of Polly "Capital Gold" Toynbee, just as the case for US statehood can be made more convincingly by pop-culture-fundamentalist "leftists" than by an unabashed fogey such as Hitchens Minor (not that he does make such a case, but he would surely see it as a lesser evil, in the exceedingly unlikely event that he ever accepts that the Britain he dreams of is geopolitically unworkable). A greater shame than ever that Auberon Waugh isn't around to make the European case, because he had the ear of people who believe, like Hitchens Minor, that J.S. Bach represents the peak of all musical achievement for all time, people who are not tied to the "rebellion" of 43 years ago as so much of the "left" still is. As it is, most "conservatives" and most "leftists" are both wedded to people who are not their natural allies (the latter, of course, can sometimes make excuses for both the worst excesses of American big business and the worst excesses of Islam: the fact that the Mail dislikes both - hypocritically in the latter case: the most natural non-Muslim sympathisers with the more extreme Islamic tendencies are social conservatives - does not mean the left should defend either). If and when either pathetic tribe returns, blinking, towards the light, I hope they will consult the likes of me, rather than either tribe's house journals, for advice on where to turn next. I may not do very well, but I have no doubt I could do better than any newspaper - of which, in terms of power to distort and lie and poison, there remain none deadlier than the Mail.

So, that should be that

No doubt the Murdoch rags will suggest that England's potential equaliser was not given because of a full-scale Blatter/Platini conspiracy (and yes, I'm well aware of the chutzpah inherent in my calling anyone else a conspiracy theorist). There is no doubt some case for comparing it to the third goal 44 years ago, and suggesting that back then England still often got what it needed because of the residue of imperial power (the global spread of British pop culture in the '60s was much more the last gasp of the old empire, always crucially dependant on the new one, than the dawn of a new, post-imperial identity for Britain which much of the Left still dangerously believe it was) whereas now, after decades of misplaced grasping and opportunity-missing, it has to fight like any other country and, both because of its history and its latterday teaboy status in someone else's empire, is less likely to get it than most. But that is just carmodising: the truth is that England were not good enough. They might well not have beaten Ghana, for whom it really would have been "more than a match" much more than this one was to either side. And they're likely to be even worse under the sort of manager The Sun would want (with the sole exception of Roy Hodgson, the only English manager who has sufficient experience of the world game that he might be able to make his mediocre, celebified charges actually care about something they can't earn grotesque amounts of money from). That is the brutal truth. It must be faced. At least now the political consequences I feared will presumably not happen - and, with right-wing English nationalism held back, it might also be easier for Andy Murray. Hopefully even The Sun will not begrudge that.