Spectator Life

Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework up the backside in London in 2021. At Euro 2024, that motif has been the hurling of plastic beer glasses. They have been thrown, in celebration or anger, by the Croatians, the Serbs, the Albanians, the Dutch, the Spanish, by our German hosts and by the excitable Scots. The latter would doubtless have thrown more had they had cause, or stuck around longer. But it was their use as projectiles by England fans which attracted most media attention – and which is likely to result in a fine from Uefa’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body.

Forget the extraordinary achievements – the reason we’re going to miss James Anderson is that, as a man, he’s so ordinary. Yes, he’s played more Tests for England than anyone else (188), and taken more wickets (701 and counting, at least for another day or two). Indeed his haul is easily the best by any fast bowler in the world – only the spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne did better, Warne by a very slim margin. Goodbye then, Jimmy, you routine superstar, you everyday hero Anderson has bowled more Test maidens than Phillip de Freitas bowled Test overs. (This is a tribute to the former rather than a dig at the latter, who played 44 times for his country.) Shoaib Bashir, one of his teammates in this final match, wasn’t even born when Anderson played his first.

Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood's young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the over-privileged, over-grown, over-thinking spoilt brat of a hero – especially when he becomes the ‘prey’ of the much older Mrs Robinson – but that the toy boy is played by the 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman and the cougar by the 35-year-old (and far more attractive) Anne Bancroft merely highlights the misogyny of the enterprise.

I blame Brexit. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, when the whole nation was still in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown, I succumbed to the prevailing mood of madness and went on a TV dating programme. No, it wasn’t Naked Attraction, the Channel 4 show in which participants strip down to reveal all to their prospective partners, but a rather more restrained show on the same channel called First Dates. I hadn’t actually even seen the programme when I noticed an ad in The Spectator appealing for single middle-aged people. I chose a Dover sole, which was an error as I was filmed plucking fishbones from my teeth My 18-year relationship had recently ended, I had moved to a new town, and like Britain freeing itself from the EU, I felt ready for a fresh beginning.

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s second round election results in France were anything to go by – with the Rassemblement National finishing third – the rap did the trick.

Rishi Sunak devoted part of the last day of his doomed premiership to meeting Becky Holt, Britain’s most tattooed mother, on ITV’s This Morning show. Ms Holt was clad in a bikini which revealed much of the 95 per cent of her body surface that is covered in tattoos. After the brief encounter, she told OK magazine that the PM had been ‘really, really polite’ and had merely inquired how much her tattoos had cost. I once had a close encounter with a woman who had her last lover’s birth sign tattooed in a very intimate spot During the 20th century and earlier, British tattoos were largely confined to sailors who had acquired them in foreign ports.

After a while you forget: was I up for Portillo, or had I gone to bed? I think I’d gone to bed. Abbott, Boateng and Bernie Grant, in bed, I definitely remember that. And Powell, accordingly, out. Was that – what? – ’87? What even was that? 1997: where the hell was I? 2010? That was the one that landed us with Cameron and Clegg, yeah? Am I right? But the 1992 general election – I definitely remember that one. That was unforgettable. I remember getting the first Tube home and listening to the Today programme before getting a couple of hours sleep I was in my twenties. Short of cash, as always, I managed to get a job as a polling clerk and as a counting assistant – double bubble.

Just after Andy Murray made the winning pass that won him Wimbledon for the first time in 2013, he looked up to the sky in pain. Not laughing with joy as Djokovic does when he wins a slam or weeping graciously as Federer did before he quietly put on his Rolex, but a sheer plea of existential pain. And wasn’t pain what Andy Murray was really all about? The emotional pain of the press conferences where he could barely conceal his dislike for the journalists, the pain of a nation’s expectation on his shoulders, and, latterly, the endless physical pain that he spoke of so often. His audience knew his pain too.