Rod Liddle

Scotland 0 Hungary 1: The Guardian called the game 'a grim slog', presumably preferring the fare offered by the twinkle-toed Latinos. Me, I loved every deeply flawed second. This was a League One play-off final, full of fury, grit and consummate uselessness. I’d far rather watch that than Spain and Italy – and even more so awful England, with their stupid, mind-numbing, witless, languor. Hell, at least these two sides TRIED. Far too late in the day the pundits are turning against Southgate Hungary were marginally the more proficient and employed the tactic of making sure Scotland had lots of the ball so they could do nothing constructive with it. The jocks had few shots on goal and none that remotely troubled the Hungarian keeper whose name was, I think, Mr Goulash.

Poland’s manager, Michael Probierz, wore a shapeless tweed-ish suit with bulging waistcoat and, when the Dutch scored their winner, had about him the demeanour of a dispossessed country squire who has just seen Angela Rayner walking up the drive with her canvassing team. He had a right to be disappointed. The Poles have been written off by everybody, as they usually are, but perhaps deserved a point from a Dutch side which combined the familiar flair going forward with the familiar frailties in defence. Poland took the lead, conceded, but for much of the second half ran the Dutch ragged, until Wout Weghorst found space inside the Free Polish Corridor to poke home the winner eight minutes or so from time. ‘Wout Weghorst’ is a popular Dutch sausage made from ground up fence posts, btw.

My father was fond of telling anyone who would listen that Britain would never entertain fascism because we all had a sense of humour which enabled us to see the ridiculousness of its hastily fabricated myths and legends. By contrast, mainland Europeans had no sense of humour at all and would happily follow any strutting oaf in a spittle-bedecked uniform. So, while the Germans had Hitler, the Spanish Franco and the Italians Mussolini, the closest we came was Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts, a hilarious creature who P.G. Wodehouse modelled on the scarcely less risible Oswald Mosley.

There was a very excitable young man on Sky News last week, talking about the Sky/YouGov MRP poll which suggested that the vast majority of Conservative MPs would lose their seats on 4 July and that those who didn’t would be stung to death by invasive killer Asian hornets which, reputedly, can eat up to 50 Tories in a single day. This would leave the Labour party and the unimaginably ghastly Ed Davey with the sort of majority reminiscent of those regularly recorded in the USSR or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

About 20 years ago, Burger King stopped selling its magnificent Double Mushroom Swiss burger, an act of corporate vandalism matched only by the decision of Heinz to discontinue its exciting range of Toast Toppers. The Double Mushroom Swiss clocked in at 910 calories, to which you could add another 150 or so by requesting a slice of bacon with it, which I always did. It is surely no coincidence my own weight began to rise from the time my favourite burger was scrapped I was reminded of this delicacy when I read the ‘Global Burden of Disease’ report in the Lancet and, in particular, the news that worldwide obesity has doubled in the past 20 years, i.e. – crucially – ever since the Double Mushroom Swiss was withdrawn. This made me think a little.

Iwas once asked by a colleague to sponsor him on an undertaking designed, he said, to raise money for a very good charitable cause. I can’t remember what the cause was – cancer, maybe, or mental kids – but I do remember the nature of the undertaking. He intended to walk a number of miles down the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. Why not, I suggested, just donate the enormous amount of money such a trek would cost direct to the charity? It would easily outweigh the amount raised, not least because miserable bastards like me would probably decide it was not a charitable act at all but first-world grandstanding with a smug hubris masquerading as kindness.

I am delighted to report that some £800,000 of taxpayers’ money is to be spent ‘remediating’ the works of Robert Louis Stevenson to show what a racist bastard he was. 70 per cent of Irish mums say they would stay at home to look after their kids if given the opportunity I assume the decision was taken because, as a nation, we are absolutely awash with cash at the moment and need somewhere to dispense of it. This project, funded by the quango UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will be carried out at Edinburgh University. I hope that, aside from clobbering Stevenson for having been born during a different time period, they also have a go at him for his stereotypical portrayal of the disabled – and indeed pirates.

You may have noticed by now that the airtime devoted to dead popstars bears scant relation to their actual importance in the genre, or indeed their popularity. So, for example, the death of the smackhead rapper Coolio was headline news on the BBC and the subject of a fawning feature on the PM programme, despite the fact that he had only one really big hit in the UK – ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ – the bones of which were written by Stevie Wonder. The tragedy of Harley, a charming and hugely talented man, is that he is remembered for one song Meanwhile, Rick Parfitt was the co-writer of a large proportion of Status Quo’s more than 60 top 30 hits – the greatest number of any band of any era – but his passing was scarcely mentioned.