Football

Well, that’s the end of that. Football, like an unrepentant runaway, stubbornly refuses to come home. Spain, deservedly probably, edged the thrilling, almost unbearably tense final and England will return to a warm, if not ecstatic, reception. England’s first football World Cup final in 57 years was undoubtedly that rarest of phenomena these days: a truly national event, with a TV audience likely to set a record for any female sports broadcast. It will also open a conversation about the importance of and future of women’s football. What should that conversation be like? I have a few suggestions and a few appeals.  For a start, can we stop comparing the men’s and women’s games in terms of quality of performance? Let’s dial down both the hype and counter-hype.

I’m loath to write about the current Fifa World Cup because criticising women’s football is textbook ‘misogyny’ – at least, that’s what Sadiq Khan thinks. The centrepiece of his recent ‘Have a word’ campaign is a video of young men discussing the women’s Euros, with viewers encouraged to press a button saying ‘Maaate’ when a line is crossed. The idea is to nip such behaviour in the bud before it escalates into violence. One particularly noxious youth describes the Euros as a ‘joke’, clearly marking him out as a potential rapist. She made a complete horlicks of her spot-kick, firing the ball over the crossbar But is that really evidence of ‘misogyny’?

I have just come back from spending some days with David Hockney at his house in Normandy. We are making a film about him – the longest film about a single subject I have ever attempted. Like Monet’s, Hockney’s environment is his subject. The great sequence of ‘The Four Seasons’ is from his grounds. He finds all the different blossoms he needs there, and there is a river and a pond. His friend has turned an old barn into a magnificent studio. David is in his mid-eighties but is as sharp as he was the first time I interviewed him for The South Bank Show in 1978.

Why has the Royal Society of Chemistry published a 37 page opinion piece entitled 'Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?' in their new journal Digital Discovery? Digital Discovery publishes 'theoretical and experimental research at the intersection of chemistry, materials science and biotechnology' focusing on 'the development and application of machine learning'. So it is a little surprising for them to publish a piece that 'argues that those who wish to have an honest debate about the limits around freedom of speech need to engage that conversation in a manner that avoids resonance with the language of White (heterosexual, cisgender male) supremacy, lest their arguments provide intellectual cover to those who would attack historically marginalised communities'.

What an emotional wringer the royal family has put us through in the past two years, from the sadness of Prince Philip’s death to the joyful Platinum Jubilee, then Queen Elizabeth II’s own extraordinarily moving funeral, and now the coronation of her son. I’ve felt so privileged to have been at Buckingham Palace for the last three events, anchoring Fox News coverage in America. After we came off air on Saturday, I mused with my two US co-presenters about what may be the next major royal occasion: a wedding, a funeral, a silver jubilee (Charles would have to live as long as his grandmother for that to happen)? Or God forbid, will the British monarchy itself be terminally contaminated by the increasingly pungent whiff of republicanism sweeping the Commonwealth?