His sloping forehead, Bobby Charlton comb-over and piercing black eyes all serve to give him a most unnerving appearance. Glover bares an uncanny resemblance to a KGB agent, and you can't help but feel he'd be more at home poisoning dissidents with umbrellas than writing reactionary newspaper articles. The following picture, while far from conclusive, could quite easily be the man himself.
Steve kicks off this week's column under the masthead of “Vulgar, nasty and a roaring success: How football is a perfect symbol of what Britain's become.” So for those of you out there who thought the only people who used the word “Vulgar” were former Smiths front man Morrisey and pseudo-intellectual twats (if indeed there's a difference) you've been proved right.
Like all of his colleagues Steve loves the past far more than the present, and laments the passing of the days when a footballer was “content with a game of darts and a couple of pints in his local pub”. Now e-mail me if I'm being too sensitive, but this rather sounds like the musings of a man who thinks the working-class oiks who make fortunes from football have got a little above their stations. Now that multi-million pound TV and sponsorship details mean footballers can drive Mercedes and live in the same west London constituency as him, Steve is more than appalled. If he's to be believed most modern footballers are “to be found downing £200 bottles of Cristal champagne in the company of slappers, or clocking one another over the head.” I fail to see how this behaviour differs from that of the average Eton school boy, or a certain prince but I think the point might be that they know how to wear a suit from Saville Row and piss through a letterbox with some class.
The astronomical salaries are the root of the problem according to Steve, and he baulks at the idea that some top-flight wage packets “now exceed City levels”. Because of course, City bankers really deserve their astronomical wages. I mean, waving your Blackberry around on the tube for 20 minutes straight is no easy task. The assertion is even made that “Premier League football exemplifies the widening gap in our society between the super rich and ordinary people.”
On a slightly different note here, that pretty much say it all doesn't it? After ten years of a Labour government, The Daily Mail's arch-conservative prince of darkness is showing concern about the wealth gap. Whatever next? Fellow columnist Richard Littlejohn calling for the workers to seize the means of production? Editor Paul Dacre urging the class suicide of the bourgeoisie in a full page headline? It seems the children's tax credit system has failed. Miserably.
Alas, if this was 'Just A Minute' I'd have been buzzed for deviation and Nicholas Parsons would have sadly had to agree. Back to the matter in hand.
After a few morose paragraphs about how English teams have no English players any more so it's not really your local team (although I dare him to say it in the Kop on a Saturday afternoon), Steve draws the link he's been crossing his legs with anticipation about since the first sentence. The influx of foreign players to Premier League makes for better football but weakens the feelings of belonging fans have for their clubs and “Mass immigration is justified on the grounds of greater economic efficiency, one consequence, though, is the weakening of a sense of belonging.”
I'm yet to meet anyone who feels less like they belong in Britain because of “Mass immigration”. Sure, some people have some issues with it, and some people are even terrified about it (Daily Mail readers mostly) but it's my view the British public at large know very well where they belong. You only have to go to Calais to realise you're from somewhere pretty special, and it would be more than a bit tough to grow a moustache, start drinking red wine, get good at sex and emigrate.
What really makes people feel like they don't belong are vital public services being sold off to the highest bidder without a thought for the population, privatised public transport networks that can't get anyone anywhere on time, illegal wars and occupations disagreed with by a vast majority of citizens, and non-doms taking billions of pounds out of our economy every year and paying less tax than a school dinner lady.
Britain isn't like a football league, it's a boxing promotions company, and the weakest keep getting punched in the face by the strongest, and sadly The Mail is one of the strongest of them all.
Also this week....
...Bel Mooney advises “Sometimes death is better than staying in a sterile marriage”. Maybe, but death is always better than reading the Mail...
...Peter Oborne calls Schools minister Ed Balls a “Class Warrior” when what I think he means is “Boring, inarticulate, bumbling liability”...
...Deborah Ross celebrates the genius that is Aunt Bessie's Yorkshire puds, assuaging the parenting guilt of aspirational working class readers without time to cook from scratch for their little darlings...
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