If you’d told Keir Starmer last summer that just over a year after his election as prime minister he would single‑handedly, and by the sheer force of his own personality, have stopped England fans from singing songs about the IRA and Ten German Bombers, he would no doubt have been delighted. I guess they must really like me then. Phase One Goals. You warned me off, Jeremy, but I knew the Arsenal thing was a good idea.
Either way Starmer has now made this happen. England fans are not singing about those things any more. They are instead singing about him being a wanker and how he should fuck off, something they continued to do this week from Birmingham to Belgrade. So, a partial success then, Sir Keir. Delivery. Pragmatism. Yes, I think we can work with this.
Any stray academics charged with chronicling the oral history of England fandom, its shared song-kitty, its bardic evolutions, will have been fascinated by the content shift of the past few months. Out: bombers, IRA, not surrendering. In: insults about the prime minister, the main hook of which is still the endlessly repeatable Keir Starm-muurs aaa waannnker to the tune of the riff from Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes.
When Jack White first wrote that hook he was famously disturbed and excited by it, aware that this thing was a monster, that it just needed shape and words. This probably wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. But the muse goes where it must, and the first few rounds could be heard shortly before kick-off on Tuesday night. It was there from Monday lunchtime in the old town pavement cafes, the new English summer songbook, the Don’t Take Me Home, the Three Wankers of its time.
That core message also cuts across musical genres. Andorra away in June was the first public unveiling of a disco take, to the tune of Give it Up by KC & The Sunshine Band. It is an ever‑evolving scene, as restlessly creative as an England 4-3-2-1. In Belgrade a new take – “We’ve got Palmer/Fuck Keir Starmer” – could be heard drifting around the cobbled streets in the wee hours of matchday morning.
At this point you could perhaps put a favourable slant on all this by saying what we’re talking about here is just a few bored men bantering in a bar, or by demonising all of those involved as flag fondlers, far‑right nutjobs, essentially primates, cutouts, non‑people. But this doesn’t really work, for two reasons.
First, because the people singing about Starmer are not the kind of extremists reported in these pages marauding across Kentish villages waving the flag like a club. These are solvent steady grown-ups, people who vote and are organised enough to travel, who were praised by the Belgrade police on Wednesday for their exemplary behaviour, and who, for what it’s worth, berated the home crowd for being racist, incorrectly in the event, when the game was stopped because somebody was shining a laser pointer at Noni Madueke. And second, because this hasn’t happened before. Starmer is the first prime minister to actively lose football. The national anthem, the Queen, the King, have been booed. But politicians have been pretty much invisible in football, even when Margaret Thatcher was actively demonising supporters, even through the public farce of Johnson and Truss. Tony Blair tried to piggyback football as a pop culture thing, but remained a gurning jackanapes on the fringes.
Starmer is the first to actively become The Enemy. How has he managed this? Perhaps because he actively tried to leverage football at the start of his premiership, which began a couple of days after Jude Bellingham’s miraculous overhead kick at the European Championship, arguably the first feel‑bad miraculous overhead kick in football history, a miraculous overhead kick that led precisely nowhere.
Starmer surfed the wave grimly, holding up a shirt with the Dutch PM, dangling the prospect of a bank holiday if England won the final, the most obvious cast‑iron guarantee that England would not win the final. A few days after that the events in Southport happened. Unrest, alienation, the two-tier Keir stuff.
Chuck in the private box stylings at Arsenal and Starmer’s relationship with football has been a perfect miniature of his failings as a political communicator, as a personal branding unit, vulnerable ‘always to more naturally charismatic personalities. The footballising of public discourse, the rise of banter‑culture as a serious political force, was already coming for him, putting him in a mode where he is uncomfortable, the geography teacher trying to breakdance. Hampered by wheeling around in a tiny little ideological space, he is often unable to say anything that doesn’t sound like a low-spec replicant pretending to understand human feelings.
But there is also more to this than the scarecrowing of an eager man in glasses. And more than simply some political comms failure metric. First we lost Avocado Woman. Laptop Bag Guy. Internet Shout Person. And now Football Cafe Man.
Football is always telling you things, pulling out a seat and inviting you to test the wind. The Starmer song is so very now. It’s alienation, loss of trust, democratic deficit. It speaks, and here wind chimes tinkle and the screen begins to dissolve, to the age of flags. The nation is currently a place of flags: flags as lament, celebration, threat, territory marker; flags as something Labour ministers must now pretend to possess in vast numbers during radio interviews, flags as bridge decor and mini-roundabout daubing. Flags as anything but the most English thing of all, something to be ignored and even avoided, a deep distrust of the powerful semiotics of a flag, a wariness of all lion and unicorn stuff, the knowledge that a flag is never just a flag.
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As a politician, if you can’t master the flag stuff you will die by the flag stuff. And it is here that football is useful, as an explainer and a natural home for this stuff. Flags have always been present in England football. Welcome to our world, the rest of the country. Except here the relationship with the flag is cautiously formalised, a more comfortable place for his kind of attachment to find a shape England fans are often dismissed en masse as chair throwers and circle-the-tables beer consumption machines, in part because they have often circled the tables, drunk beer and thrown chairs. But we remember also Gareth Southgate’s idea of Englishness, the most coherent version of patriotism any public figure has voiced in recent years, or Roy Hodgson talking fluent, courteous Croydon-accented French in the Wembley press room after the Paris terror attacks of 2015.
It’s there in the fond chintzy portable pageantry of the away trip, a shipping forecast map of the nation from Hull to Portsmouth to Bristol. The best football version of flag culture is not a craven, dog-like me and my country thing, not Tommy Robinson fans weaponising the experience for the benefit of an online post. It includes a natural distrust of authority, fondness for home, the memory of resistance and indifference to the National Front trying to infiltrate terrace culture in the 1980s. Starmer, unable to find any kind of path in football, could do a lot worse than to study England football’s management of this.
And in many ways it felt fitting that Belgrade’s Marakana should be the stage for a glimpse of the full-blown Keir dialectic, in part because this is the kind of stadium people like to fetishise as a rage-space, a journey into the deep dark heart of footballing nationalism, even if England turned up led by a gaunt German technocrat who even seems a bit bored and drifty when he’s talking tactics these days.
But in the end there was a sadness about Serbia here, not just in the poverty of Dragan Stojkovic’s team, but in the basic unhappiness around it. Stojkovic’s name was booed inside the stadium before kick-off, a reaction to his recent statements in support of the government. Later, a group of black-shirted men, described variously as local henchmen, would intervene as the crowd were singing their own anti-government songs, an extension of the suppression of protest against Aleksandar Vucic’s authoritarian government.
Serbia is in a very strange in-out space right now, ranged across the lines of power, still formally semi-pretending it wants to join the EU, while also aligning itself with Vladimir Putin. Its people seem enraged and disgusted by the spectre of government corruption, exasperated with cronyism, grey power, time-servers, the weaponing of popular fears by the media.
It could be tempting here to say, well, it sounds a lot like the UK. But only a bit, so far. And Serbia itself is a warning from the darkest extreme of this process, a nation where the horrendous ethnic bloodshed of a quarter of a century ago is still right there in the eyeline. Beware all flag stuff, the demonising of outsiders, the thinnest end of nationalist obsession. Still being able to call Keir Starmer names at the football without the attentions of the men with batons is at the very least a kind of freedom. Plus the Christmas No 1 is probably sorted. Fire up Midge Ure. Keir Starmer’s a Wanker is here to stay for now. And football is, once again, telling us things.
