Boris Johnson’s major speech to explain the “levelling-up” agenda opted instead to completely level it. I can’t say I’ve ever cared for this phrase “levelling up”. It has base notes of Fred West. The fact that no member of Johnson’s government seems to know what it is reinforces the suspicion that it’s a good place to bury bad motives. I can no longer hear the phrase used by a cabinet minister without picturing the individual in question smoothing over some wet concrete and congratulating himself on some good “levelling up”.
The prime minister had the chance to create new images, of course, but preferred to brutalise metaphor. We learned from this celebrated prose stylist, mere words apart, that the economy is both “poised to recover like a coiled spring” and “slowly and cautiously picking itself up off the floor”. It was hardcore gibberish. I refuse to believe there was anything on his autocue, unless it was the words: “YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, BIG BOY – WELCOME TO YOUR ANXIETY DREAM.”
Johnson’s hair, always ridiculous, now seems to have reached animal rescue stage. The PM resembles one of those old English sheepdogs that charities put on sad-music fundraising adverts, with a voice saying: “When Boris came to us, his coat was so matted he was effectively blind … ” Or maybe he’s the star of an 80-minute Netflix movie in which the sheepdog somehow becomes president, and we end up learning a lot – if not about politics or ourselves, then definitely about the Netflix commissioning process.
The speech, supposedly months in the planning, was so bad it reminded me of the gold standard in this department – the one where he went to a Yorkshire police academy in 2019, shortly after winning the leadership election, and served up something so disturbingly weird that it gave a woman police officer standing behind him a whitey. Instead of stopping to help her, he bulldozed sociopathically on with his talking points.
That said, the great levelling-up letdown was a perhaps fitting end to the week. It certainly has been a few days to savour in the story of this septic isle. Consider just this one sequence of events. On Sunday afternoon, a pissed and coked-up England fan put a flare up his arse to delight onlookers and the wider internet. On Sunday evening, THAT guy joined thousands of other ticketless fans in successfully contriving to breach the “security arrangements” – sarcastic airquotes only, please – for the Euros final at Wembley. And on Wednesday the Met chief, Cressida Dick, was not being relieved of her job, but being made a Dame Commander at Buckingham Palace, having long ago been anointed as one of the people in public life who not only cannot fail but must somehow be advanced further, no matter the cock-ups.
What a country. Hello, world! The security operation for a major international tournament final, at 8pm after all-day drinking, was so hopeless that it was outfoxed by arse-flare guy. Worse still, the Met seem both keen to offload this on to the Wembley authorities and to stress that despite people openly organising on social media channels in the days leading up to the final, they had no intelligence about plans to breach security. And yet, the only intelligence you really need is “living in England”, “knowing what some people are like”, “seeing how other countries hosting finals do it” and “having the first clue or foresight about anything”.
This simply does not happen at stadiums in other countries and at other tournaments. (City centres are different; there was an attempt to storm a fanzone near the Eiffel Tower in Paris at the final of Euro 2016.) At every international tournament final I’ve attended, cordons begin far away from the stadium, and there are several of them. Not at Wembley, of course, which was redesigned by architects who appeared not to understand what it was for, and allowed the whole scheme to spiral wildly over budget as one of the most notoriously worst-run public construction projects, even by the UK’s own exacting standards. (In 2007, £1m was spent on photocopying alone.)
It now seems incredible to remember how patronising various England blazers were when South Africa won the 2010 World Cup bid, with bigwigs forever telling people that England would probably be required to step in and host once it was clear a country “like that” couldn’t get it together. But there was no ticketless storming of Soccer City when the final came to be played in Johannesburg. There were no arse-flares.
Despite this, the Met could be found eulogising its Sunday performance all week long. Not for them the self-flagellation to which 19-year-old penalty-missers submitted themselves. According to one senior officer, they had “deployed one of the most significant and comprehensive policing plans” ever used at a football match. As Dick herself put it: “I’m very proud of my officers and the command team.” Yet another Cressida-based statement to which the only reaction can be: fuck me, what would it take?
Against this backdrop, it’s hugely impressive to find Johnson & Co still somehow talking about a 2030 World Cup joint bid with Ireland this week. Guys? GUYS? WHAT ARE YOU EVEN THINKING? After Sunday’s chaos, don’t even bother putting a bid together, unless you honestly can’t think of another way to spaff some of our money up a wall. The scenes at Wembley were so utterly fiascoid that your bid would be seen as auto-satirical, unless you’re willing to covertly shovel billions of pounds to nameless Fifa ExCo members. Actually, if the last year of Covid contracts has taught us anything, it’s perhaps that you are willing to do business along those lines. Would it help if any of them were mates of Matt Hancock? Maybe the head of one of the more obscure football confederations once pulled him a pint.
As for the rest of the final fallout, there have been few more unedifying political spectacles recently than that of the PM and assorted cabinet idiots trying to reverse-ferret over their sustained refusal to condemn those booing the England players taking a knee. By yesterday, Stone Island prime minister Boris Johnson was claiming never to have said them things. “I always said that it was wrong to boo the England players,” he lied, live on telly. What can you say? Maybe his spokesman was “hacked”, like some rando’s Twitter account. All in all, the kind of week over which it would be better to draw a heavy veil. If that really was the government’s big idea, then we’re not so much running on fumes as on arse-flares.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist