It's not just footballers who should learn an Olympic lesson

We've all seen the pictures of the Chancellor being booed heartily by the crowd in the Olympic Stadium when he took part in a medal ceremony. The reaction of most people seemed to be amusement and it is, in fairness, always slightly funny to see a politician getting the bird when they stick their head above the parapet.

But the Tories should be careful to heed what was a pretty emphatic warning. The sound did not come across as a few malcontents - it seemed as though the entire stadium, 82,000 people, were joining in lustily. That is a significant and representative sample of the electorate they have to face at the next general election, letting a deeply unpopular Chancellor know what they think of him. Not that I believe it was an entirely party political thing - witness the reception Cameron and Boris Johnson, Tories both, received at the parade of Olympians outside Buckingham Palace on Monday 10th.

Rather, this was, I believe, a firm statement of the distaste people feel for a man who's making savage cuts to budgets across the public sector, across services that affect everybody, and ignoring the howls of protest that he's doing so too quickly and too deeply. The reshuffle (or rearrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs) they just undertook left Osborne bizarrely unaffected. He seems absolutely bomb-proof, of all the possible candidates Cameron could have moved. I don't know if this represents blind faith in their dogmatic approach to spending policy, blind faith in Osborne himself or simple, stubborn stupidity.

Whichever it is, the Tories may find out to their cost just how heartfelt those boos were, how indicative of the strength of feeling against the Chancellor, if they do not heed them.

Things I don't understand

I thought that I basically understood the football fan as an animal, thought the same way as pretty much all of them. We're fond of saying that the things in football which divide us are far outnumbered by the things which unite us. However, the support at the England game have left me baffled. It's currently half time. The crowd were (largely) supportive when the team came out, and got behind them with the exception of John Terry and Ashley Cole, who came in for some mild barracking. Then, having watched a greatly improved first half performance in a more fluid system, they lustily booed them off at half time.

Go figure.

To boo or not to boo? That is today's question

Listening to TalkSport this evening, they were questioning early arrivers to Wembley for tonight's England game as to their response to the players this evening. Are they going to boo? The response was mixed. Some saying definitely yes, some saying definitely no, some saying it depended on how pissed they got before kick-off. (Good luck with that - you can't buy a beer inside the stadium, apparently us footie fans are all such atavistic reprobates that we can't be sold alcohol, oh no...)

Anyway, this made me wonder whether I'd boo them. The fact is, I've always thought that it's about the shirt. In one respect, if you're booing an England player, you're booing the shirt, the England team entity, which is blameless in all this. And if you boo, you're booing the also blameless 13 players who were nowhere near South Africa and cannot be faulted for the dismal performances out there.

However. And it's a big one. Certain members of that team, I'm not going to name names but it's Ashley Cole and Wayne Rooney, deserve to be told exactly what people think of them. Cole for his ill-mannered and graceless comments about the support after the tournament, Rooney for his during the tournament, on which I've already commented here.

I think, on balance, I'd probably refrain from booing, personally - it's probably not going to bother the mercenary sods anyway, and can only help the opposition. But I have no words of reproach for those who do boo them tonight. They've earned it, on balance.