Rod Liddle

Match 3: England 1 (MBE 57) Croatia 0  I have no animus against Croatia. Catholic Slavs who think they’re Austrians, basically: not a bad mix. Many of my friends, the Spiked lot – ie former Revolutionary Communist Party – turn puce if you mention the name of the country. My mate Mick Hume, for example, wouldn’t dream of going there on holiday. Ustase! Nazi collaborators! Ah live and let live, Mick. Look at Luka Modric’s mournful little face – how can you not love him? And their islands. I’ve had such wonderful meals on islands named by an imbecile: Krk, Rab, Pag.  Horseface left Jack Grealish out but otherwise picked a reasonable side.

Match 2: Switzerland 1 (Carl Jung 49) Wales 1 (Carl Jung og 74) Ah, the perils of arrogance and a superiority complex. Switzerland – historically perhaps the most over-achieving international football side in the world, alongside Uruguay – were hammering the Welsh. Mollocating them. This was a case of complete dominance; quick, incisive passing which left the sons of Glyndŵr confused and oafish. They scored in the 49thminute – after which, they decided they’d done enough for the day. These rain-soaked warbling valley dwellers were simply beneath their station, they reckoned – and they became dilatory, lazy, careless. They failed to track back. They gave up on attacking.

Game One Turkey 0 Italy 3 The start of the tournament and the first game was overshadowed by the exciting news that Scotland’s players intend to kneel, when they play England next week. They had originally not intended to 'take a knee' – thinking it rightly (to judge from their press statements) a pointless and embarrassing bit of showing off. But they changed their mind, presumably after fevered phone calls from south of the border. They should have stuck to their guns: the kneeling has become a ludicrous vanity project for Gareth Southgate and the Football Association. It gets sillier by the day. Needless to say, neither the young Turks nor the more elderly Italians did anything so stupid as to kneel and nor will Croatia on Sunday.

The headline ‘Government to allow people to hug’ one might have expected to hear on early evening news bulletins in January 1661, shortly after Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed and puritanism began its slow and welcome withdrawal from England. It sounds a little odd in 2021. Below the headline came the inevitable caveats from the medical clerisy. While hugging you should turn your face aside so as to minimise the risk of infecting the person you are embracing. I think people are also enjoined to keep their hands well above the waist — during amorous encounters with people in your ‘bubble’ you are allowed only to ‘get your tops’, as we schoolboys used to put it. No kissing, and certainly not with tongues.

It’s not just the Labour party which is institutionally incapable of understanding why the Conservative party kicked the hell out of them in these elections. It is also, of course, the BBC. The prime offender was — hold your breath in surprise — Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Furlough and vaccines were the sole reason the Tories did well, according to this very affluent, metropolitan, liberal woman, who has a child in boarding school, natch. Dimbo voters again then, too dense to grasp the ‘realities'. But then there was Huw. There always is Mr Edwards. Conducting an interview with Labour’s Lucy Powell, he exuded sympathy and gratitude. No hard questions. Just ameliatory bilge.

We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled altar in the back garden, in front of a blazing fire. We then drank a little of the creature’s blood and danced naked around a pentagram, delivering incantations to the Covid Divine — Oh Great Lord Of The Slightly Ticklish Persistent Cough. Vaccines were presented and respirators borne aloft. It all seemed a bit rough on the goat, frankly, which had done nobody any harm. But it was preferable to the usual rituals which we are these days enjoined to observe — the endless minute silences for everybody who has died of anything ever, taking a knee, banging saucepans to thank nurses for turning up to work.

A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot of murdering, I mean shopping, officer. Technically speaking, I wouldn’t even need to bother with the wig. That’s one flaw in the mad woman’s argument, then.