Can Boris Johnson Bridge The Gap Between The Tories And The England Team?
Youre reading The Waugh Zone, our daily politics briefing. Sign up now to get it by email in the evening. It was Wednesday, just after noon and, in an imposing building overlooking the Thames in Westminster, the questions on football and racism were coming thick and fast. But the venue was not the House of Commons and the speaker was not the prime minister. In the fortified bowels of MI5s Thames House HQ, director general (aka the DG) Ken McCallum was answering queries from the media, including yours truly. Whereas PMQs thrives off the bearpit jeers and cheers, DGQs is an altogether more sober affair, befitting its annual rather than weekly schedule. Yet when McCallum was asked about the problems of online extremism and the impact on young black men in the national team, he sounded more eloquent than many politicians. At almost exactly the same moment that Boris Johnson was squirming under Keir Starmers prosecutorial glare, the domestic spymaster was unambiguously praising the England football team for their conduct over the past few weeks. And he explicitly compared his own behind-the-scenes team with the one that performed on Europes biggest stage last weekend. As I watched the penalty shootout on Sunday night, he said, I was very aware that Ive got experience, MI5 has got experience, of watching capable, brave young people of all races, giving their all for their country.  He went on to say that racism was strongly associated with extreme right wing terror groups whose activity has in recent years become a daily, significant part of his agencys work. And he clearly meant it when he declared: Im proud of many of the people in MI5 today, working to deal with the terrorist threat that is fuelled in important ways by toxic racism. Even the most determined culture warrior would find it difficult to argue that McCallum, the youngest DG in the agencys history, is some kind of woke Marxist. The Security Service, just like the England football team, benefits from diversity in a very practical sense as well as a symbolic sense. Looking like the nation it serves is a necessity, not PC gone mad. But the contrast between the ease with which McCallum spoke about race, and the discomfort of the PM on the same topic just a few hundred yards away, could not have been more stark. As Starmer marshalled the evidence of senior ministers mixed messaging on booing players who take the knee, Johnson could tell his usual vaccines-vaccillation-remoaner distraction technique wouldnt work. With Priti Patel having said booing the team was a choice, with No10 having said the PM fully respects the right of those booing to make their feelings known, even the later U-turn was too late to use as a defence. The real problem was that Johnson resembled the wonky trolley of Dominic Cummings image. Drawing a culture war dividing line only works if you dont keep hopscotching over it yourself. Put another way, wedge issues (as the Americans call them) are a bit pointless if they end up giving the instigator a political wedgie (as we British would call it). If they noticed at all, the minority of voters who think booing is ok may have been simply been confused by the PMs shifting stance. He did have one concrete policy announcement in his back pocket, namely extending football ground banning orders to be triggered by online as well as offline offences. Yet even that welcome development was obscured by the bigger row over the gulf between the Tory party and the England team. And when a Tory MP heckled that footballer Tyrone Mings was a Labour party member they managed to undermine rather than help the PMs case (I do not want to engage in a political culture war of any kind). Aside from anything else, failing to praise working class black and white kids who go on to become self-made millionaires sounds a strangely un-Tory thing to do. If the whole booing issue and taking the knee issue had not been weaponised by some ministers, Johnson could even have said his own cabinet team mirrored the diversity of the England team and was stronger as a result. Perhaps the most revealing remark of the week however came not in PMQs but in Tory backbencher Natalie Elphickes private message to colleagues: They lost - would it be ungenerous to suggest Rashford should have spent more time perfecting his game and less time playing politics.  Note that Elphicke didnt say we lost, she said they lost. Despite her subsequent apology, that word they was possibly as damaging to the Tory brand as any explicit racist epithet could have been. It exposed a gap between some in her party and the national team in a brutal fashion, just when any normal politician would want to celebrate their achievement. Its that gap, which is implicitly also a gap between a party and the public, that worries some Conservatives dismayed by the culture war rhetoric. Its also why any future visit to No.10 of the England team (to promote our World Cup bid, for example) is now freighted with tension. Maybe MI5 down the road could act as a neutral venue.