This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.“The thing with the royal family is that for most of the time, it’s just a slightly tawdry soap opera,” a friend of mine reflected when we met up in the days after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth earlier this year. “But then, occasionally, it rises to become pure opera.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.“The thing with the royal family is that for most of the time, it’s just a slightly tawdry soap opera,” a friend of mine reflected when we met up in the days after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth earlier this year. “But then, occasionally, it rises to become pure opera.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Day six of the World Cup and it’s the United States versus England, big Satan versus little Satan in the great battle of the evil imperialists. At stake, a place in the next round of a competition that would likely never have existed without the soccer-spreading British empire, taking place in a country that is unlikely to have existed without it either.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Day six of the World Cup and it’s the United States versus England, big Satan versus little Satan in the great battle of the evil imperialists. At stake, a place in the next round of a competition that would likely never have existed without the soccer-spreading British empire, taking place in a country that is unlikely to have existed without it either.
For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers. Over the past three weeks, the U.K.
The Queen is dead. Long live the King. How strange this process, how archaic and theatrical, moving and melancholy, mixing the worlds of King Arthur and Netflix. We are often told that it is this connection to the deep past that gives monarchy its meaning. But as the world prepares for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London tomorrow, the unchanging continuity is less significant than the subtle evolution of the nation that it conceals.
Queen Elizabeth II’s longevity alone places her in the pantheon of royal greats. At the time of her death, at Balmoral Castle today, she had served 70 years as Queen—the longest of any sovereign in the English monarchy’s 1,000-year history. But it is not simply her longevity that marks her for greatness, but her ability to stay relevant as the world changed around her.
Barely a month ago, Northern Ireland’s former first minister David Trimble and his old partner in peace, the Republic of Ireland’s Bertie Ahern, were sitting together in Belfast reminiscing about what they had built. With John Hume’s death in 2020, Trimble and Ahern were among the last of the island’s old giants. And now Trimble has gone too.
England isn’t supposed to be this hot. Certainly not London. Contrary to popular imagination, it doesn’t actually rain that much here: We have fewer rainy days than Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, or Zurich. London is a city with a gentle, undulating climate; of wispy red sunsets and cloudy, gray days; where drab winters give way to soft springs and mild summers; and where drinking indoors almost always feels right and eating outdoors just a bit forced.
In times of crisis, Britain’s arcane constitution seems absurd—often because it is absurd. Questions emerge to which no one ever seems entirely sure of the answer.
Don’t stop me just because you’ve heard this story before, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson is once again fighting for his political life. And once again, this time it might be the end. After yet another scandal, once again made worse by an absurdly stupid cover-up, two very senior members of Johnson’s government—his finance minister and his health minister—quit in disgust.Is the game really up, then? For anyone else, the answer would surely be yes.
If Donald Trump returns to power in 2025, he will find a world starkly different from the one he tried to construct while president. All hopes of normalizing relations with Russia have been obliterated in the slaughter of Ukraine. China is more powerful than ever. Iran is closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. And Kim Jong Un is still behaving like Kim Jong Un.But, in a narrow yet important sense, the world has become more Trumpian since he left office.
Britain today is a poor and divided country. Parts of London and the southeast of England might be among the wealthiest places on the planet, but swaths of northern England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are among Western Europe’s poorest. Barely a decade ago, the average Brit was as wealthy as the average German. Now they are about 15 percent poorer—and 30 percent worse off than the typical American.
The novel Jamilia tells the story of a free-spirited woman trapped in a passionless marriage who is suddenly awakened by the arrival of a mournful, lonely outsider who touches something in her soul. Set in Kyrgyzstan, it achieved a degree of fame in the West after it was praised by the French poet Louis Aragon as “the most beautiful love story in the world.
Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.
The Western world must prepare itself for a long war in Ukraine that will require ongoing support for Kyiv to guarantee Russia’s defeat, as well as reinforced defenses across Europe to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not underestimate NATO’s readiness to defend “every inch” of its territory, Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance’s secretary-general, told me recently.
The philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote that people become conservative as they experience loss; the sense of passing, of dying and death. Loss gives them a love of things as they are, a desire to hold, to protect, to conserve—even if all attempts to do so come too late.I thought of this recently when I found myself in the absurd situation of feeling sad that a multimillionaire French soccer player had decided against joining the world’s most successful club.
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell introduced President George W. Bush to the “Pottery Barn rule”: “You break it, you own it.” Powell’s point was that military victory over Saddam Hussein would not be the end of America’s involvement, but the beginning. Something similar is true for Northern Ireland today, where the fragile peace settlement that has just about held for nearly a quarter century is close to breaking.
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces bogged down in Ukraine, apparently unable to defeat one of the poorest nations in Europe, and China locking up millions of people in a seemingly never-ending battle to contain COVID-19, the once-ubiquitous idea of inevitable Western decline has suddenly been called into question. Out of nowhere, the free world once again stands for something, and is even showing signs of shaking itself out of its decades-long torpor.
Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.
Three seismic events have occurred in one go in Northern Ireland. One, for the first time in Northern Ireland’s 100-year existence, an Irish nationalist party placed first in an election—and not just any nationalist party, but Sinn Fein, the longtime political wing of the Irish Republican Army.
Winston Churchill was once asked whether he thought that Charles de Gaulle was a great man. “He is selfish, he is arrogant, he believes he is the center of the world,” Churchill replied. “You are quite right. He is a great man.” Something similar might be true of Emmanuel Macron.
We live in a time of constant upheaval and infuriating inertia. Existential threats to Western democracy abound, but nothing seems to change. With new ideas and technologies transforming the ways we live and work, much of the public seems impatient, urging on change, while the rest demands control and protection. Amid such feverish division, elections morph from battles of ideas to totemic fights for a nation’s soul.
If one week could somehow sum up Boris Johnson’s chaotic premiership, this was it. Last Saturday, Johnson was feted after becoming the first G7 leader to travel to Kyiv since the Russian invasion. He was hailed by Volodymyr Zelensky, cheered by Ukrainians in the streets, and even grudgingly praised by his enemies at home and his critics abroad.
If one week could somehow sum up Boris Johnson’s chaotic premiership, this was it. Last Saturday, Johnson was feted after becoming the first G7 leader to travel to Kyiv since the Russian invasion. He was hailed by Volodymyr Zelensky, cheered by Ukrainians in the streets, and even grudgingly praised by his enemies at home and his critics abroad.
Donald Trump was supposed to have changed the world, robbing America not just of its luster but of its allies’ trust. Here was a president of such gauche ignorance and hostility, it seemed impossible that American power would ever be seen in the same light again. For Europe, in particular, Trump’s jingoistic belligerence was poised to be an adrenaline shot to the heart, Pulp Fiction–style, jolting the continent out of its American dependency.
Donald Trump was supposed to have changed the world, robbing America not just of its luster but of its allies’ trust. Here was a president of such gauche ignorance and hostility, it seemed impossible that American power would ever be seen in the same light again. For Europe, in particular, Trump’s jingoistic belligerence was poised to be an adrenaline shot to the heart, Pulp Fiction–style, jolting the continent out of its American dependency.
There is a peculiar modern tendency to describe things we don’t like as belonging to the past. The Taliban are medieval, Donald Trump supporters backward, Brexiteers nostalgic for empire. Under this rubric, Vladimir Putin is a Soviet throwback and the war he may soon start in Ukraine, as John Kerry once remarked, is like some 19th-century skirmish transplanted into the 21st.
Vladimir Putin likes to say that playing chess with the United States is like playing against a pigeon: It struts around the board, knocks over the pieces, shits everywhere, and then declares victory. Playing chess with Europe, in contrast, must be like playing with a child who has forgotten the rules of the game, claims to have invented new ones, and then sulks when no one wants to play.For so long, many people in Europe, including the U.K.
We were in the White Room in 10 Downing Street, and Boris Johnson was joking around with the photographer who was taking his portrait. “You’re like the kind-of taxidermist in The Godfather,” Johnson said, laughing. “Do you remember? The funeral—the undertaker?” He then launched into his Don Corleone impression. “‘Buona sera, buona sera, see what a massacre they’ve made of my son.