The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and Clarifications column, Friday 22 October 2004:
Several readers wrote in to point out that it was Liverpool who were traditionally the Protestant team and Everton the Catholic, and not the other way round, as we stated in this article. Many Liverpudlians insist that these affiliations now exist only as a memory and that sectarianism is repudiated in the city.
If only Bron could have seen it. For years, Auberon Waugh told the readers of the Spectator that Liverpool represented everything hateful about modern England, with its idle, drunken “workers” and its 14-year-old girls who could be had for a Mars bar.
Today Bron Waugh will turn scornfully in his grave as the editor of the Spectator sets off on his penitential mission to Merseyside, where Michael Howard has ordered Boris Johnson to apologise in person for last week’s tactless leading article about Liverpudlian self-pity. There has been nothing like it since Henry II knelt in contrition at Canterbury cathedral after the murder of Beckett.
It would be unkind to say Boris had it coming. And yet part of his boyish charm is his detached relationship with the Spectator. As Lady Bracknell might have said, the magazine’s contents evidently come to the editor as a surprise, pleasant or otherwise as the case might be. Mark Steyn predicting a Bush landslide four years ago? Gosh! Another column by Taki warning about the threat to white civilisation. Cripes! A leader saying Liverpudlians are “hooked on grief” just because one of their number has been beheaded by murderous madmen? Yaroo!
Given the lad’s laid-back attitude, there’s a chance that he’ll end up at Liverpool Street station. But assuming he makes it to Lime Street, he may need some tips about that great city.
One Liverpool constituency is Edge Hill, long represented for the Lib Dems by the pious Catholic David Alton, and twice contested for the Tories by Michael Howard. It was also once the penultimate stop on the tramline to the docks, so that “getting off at Edge Hill” was Liverpudlian for coitus interruptus (no reflection on Alton or Howard).
Liverpool has a rich political tradition. Boris can look in on Rodney Street, the birthplace of “the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories”, as Macaulay called the young Gladstone. From the 1880s to the 1920s one Liverpool constituency was represented at Westminster by an Irish nationalist. On the other hand, militant Protestantism meant that up to the second half of the last century the Tories held a majority of Liverpool seats thanks to “the Orange vote”, although that’s not a tradition to invoke too enthusiastically any more.
An echo of sectarian divisions can still be heard in football, so try not to confuse the two teams (as Michael Howard did at the beginning of his career). Liverpool are the Catholic team and play in red at Anfield. Mention Xabi Alonso, maybe with knowing raised eyebrows; don’t mention Michael Owen except with a knowing sneer. Everton are the Protestant team and play in blue at Goodison Park. Mention Dixie Dean, not Wayne Rooney.
Boris will find that they don’t mess around on Merseyside. When Bill Shankly was manager of Liverpool, and was rebuked because his team weren’t playing entertainingly enough, he replied that “if people want entertainment they can go to the f*cking circus”. Boris can be very entertaining, but he might ponder whether Shankly’s epigram doesn’t have some political application.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s book, The Strange Death of Tory England, will be published by Penguin in the new year
