David Cameron's own goal

DAVID CAMERON’S inability to remember which football team he claims to support—he said on April 25th he was a West Ham fan, despite having for years claimed to follow a different team in claret-and-blue, Aston Villa—was the most embarrassing gaffe of his career. It made him look foolish. It made him look a fraud. It also stands for how imperfectly the Conservative prime minister has learned the lessons of Tony Blair, his thrice-winning New Labour predecessor, who was a far more accomplished phony football fan.

Mr Blair was not the first Labour Party prime minister to understand the potency of Britain’s most popular game. Harold Wilson, a prime minister of the 1960s and 70s, was a Huddersfield Town fan who compared politics and football endlessly. After England won the World Cup in 1966 he quipped that this had only ever happened under a Labour government; he blamed Labour’s defeat in the 1970 election on the goal, scored by Gerd Muller for West Germany, that had knocked England out of the World Cup four days before. But if Mr Wilson’s flaunting of his passion for the working-man’s game grated, no one doubted that his passion was real. Not least, because at this time English football was similarly politicised and left-wing. “The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life,” said Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club. Brian Clough, another great manager, and socialist, turned down invitations to stand as a Labour MP. But what Mr Wilson gently manipulated, Mr Blair span outrageously.