Will it help Boris Johnson if England does well in the Euros?
There are three myths about football and British politics, and they are all wrong. The easiest to dismiss is the idea that England winning the World Cup in 1966 helped Harold Wilson win the landslide election that year. The election was in March and the World Cup was in July, so that doesnt work. It must be that, for some Labour people, the year dissolved into one happy blur in the memory. The second myth is that Wilsons surprise defeat by Ted Heath four years later was caused by England, the defending champions, being knocked out of the next World Cup by West Germany. At least the timetable is more plausible this time, as England, having taken a 2-0 lead in the quarter-finals, lost 3-2, and the election was four days later. The shock from that defeat to the national prestige was seized upon by commentators trying to explain the late swing in public opinion that had taken them by surprise. As Matt Singh, the pollster for Number Cruncher Politics, explained last year, the 1970 general election was unusual in that the result was a surprise and that polling error did not seem to be the cause. A significant number of voters did seem to have changed their minds in the last few days of the campaign.