And, when they have finished with us, there will be meatier enemies to face.Victory in the World Cup is supposed to have assisted Harold Wilson in the polls. Unfortunately for Mr Major, England’s team of graceless artisans (with exceptions, of course) has little chance of winning the European Championship. But that is no reason for the Tories to ignore the opportunities the competition provides. England’s supporters may well triumph on the terraces, if not on the field of battle. I see them puffed up with prepackaged patriotism and shrink-wrapped burgers, all taunting the Froggies, Krauts and assorted Wops with their copywritten war-cries: Beef for Brits, Not Chicken Shits. Johnny Bull, Meat with Balls.Hitherto pariahs, but now licensed by the Government and their propagandists, they will gleefully take on their traditional role of cannon fodder: as always, pawns in a larger game.

Charging not at enemy guns, but at slices of beef which may or may not be the death of them. And all for a single cause, the re-election of a Conservative government.But Mr Major had better beware, lest the ersatz autobahn angst he has provoked goes supernova; lest blood flows, blood that isn’t only bovine He must put on the brakes before it is too late How? By making the supreme sacrifice I’m not talking resignation; things have gone too far. There is only one way out; Mr Major must take the bull by the horns; must selflessly order a universal cull in the cabinet room itself. Only then will I be able to cheer England with a clear conscience “Dad,” cries Seth, “you’ve gone too far. They’ll hang you for treason.” “Shut up and eat your tofu,” I sayThis is the first of four columns by Clive Sinclair.

At the time of the 1848 revolutions, the 25-year-old Matthew Arnold opined: “A 100 years hence the Continent will be a great united Federal Republic, and England, all her colonies gone, in a dull steady decay.” The experiences of his mature years only served to confirm this vision. Arnold saw an England dedicated to a smug, soul-stifling short-termism, shackled by a class system which its immensely powerful aristocracy was determined to perpetuate. He saw it suppressing the cultures of the sister- countries of the United Kingdom, and, through its blend of blindness and contempt, incurring misery and violence in Ireland whose problems dominated the political agenda throughout his life. Even more curiously the name of England was, he realised, evoked to keep down the majority of its people. Arnold’s opposition here was practical as well as polemical. For 35 years he worked tirelessly as a Schools Inspector, devoted to the ideal of universal state education and, by means of personally conducted surveys, emphasising how England lagged behind France and Germany in both ideas and practices.