SHARED OPINION

How you can tell that these hooligans aren't up to conducting a serious foreign policy

FRANK JOHNSON

The most interesting remark so far about these present tumults was that of the Home Secretary. Mr Straw had incurred hostile crit- icism for being unable, despite all his promis- es to the Continental powers, to prevent our hooligans from invading the Low Countries, and sacking the main square at Charleroi. Hardly any of those Englishmen whom the Belgian police arrested had any hooligan- related convictions, he said. He added that many of them were middle-class profession- als; 'barristers and engineers', he pointed out.

Does this mean that many middle-class Englishmen, pillars of pomposity here at home, live exciting double lives as soccer hooligans when abroad; that when their womenfolk are not with them, it is not at all foie gras in the Dordogne, and art in Tus- cany? As an observer of this class over the years, I had long suspected it.

`What is votre métier?' the Belgian police- men would have asked them as part of the paperwork once they were safely tear- gassed and handcuffed. 'That means, "What's your job?" ' British professional gentleman: 'Thank you, but I was perfectly capable of under- standing your French, heavy with a Flemish accent though it was. My name is George Carman, QC, barrister-at-law.'

Policeman (addressing another English captive): 'Et vous?'

Englishman: Isambard Kingdom Brunel — engineer — a votre service.'

Wearily, the policeman completes his list of métiers among the captive hooligans: Lord of Appeal; Director of Opera Plan- ning, Glyndebourne; Keeper of Prints, the Ashmolean; Head Master of Eton . . . the usual upper-middle-class jobs. But one would have thought that, however well these professionals might be concealing their secret identities, something of the hooligan double life would peep through as they went about their professional activities here in England.

Might not a judge have to admonish counsel: 'Throughout this case, Sir Hartley, you have maintained a steady stream of obscene chants about the private lives of Posh and Becks. I myself had the honour of having rioted at Charleroi, but your behaviour here at home cannot but bring the High Court into disrepute. Kindly desist before I inform the Bar Council.'

Sir Hartley: 'Come on if you're 'ard enough, my lord.' Judge: 'Much obliged.'

All I committed myself to earlier was that I suspected Mr Straw might be right. I have always detected a certain hooliganism beneath the smooth surface of the English professional man. Admittedly, my contact with him is largely confined to the intervals at Covent Garden. He is there under suf- ferance — sufferance being broadly defined as his wife. He is either 'entertaining a client' or a client who is being entertained. His interval conversation is only briefly about the work of art being attended: `Lovely tunes, goes on a bit, though. Got in any shooting lately, Bill?' The obsession with shooting gives him the air of a man who would rather be killing something, preferably several scenes separating him from his dinner.

Yet, if Mr Straw is right, the very ordeal facing our professional men once they have arrived at Covent Garden or sweated down to Glyndebourne suggests that, occasional- ly, they would riot there and then, hurling restaurant chairs across that Sussex garden. But we seldom read Wagner's Ring ended at Covent Garden last night with only 50 arrests. Home Secretary Jack Straw said he was "satisfied" with the police operation.'

So perhaps Mr Straw was wrong after all. The most prominently photographed of the English hooligans in Belgium did not have the look of an average Inner Temple silk — the one with the especially promi- nent, tattooed embonpoint (the hooligan, I mean, not the average Inner Temple silk). Or perhaps there was a more political explanation for Mr Straw's remarks. Per- haps he was making a late entry into the class war on the side of Mr Gordon Brown, blaming the professional classes, and thus by implication the Tories, for the shame which the rioting has once more brought on England.

But, as I say, the photographs suggest that the English action was carried out by I was merely giving expression to my Eurosceptic sentiments.' the underclass, if not by old Labour's core voters. Its strategic incompetence suggests so. For example, our rioters have made enemies of the Turks. This is a break with British foreign policy when it was conduct- ed by the aristocracy and upper class. It was then our policy to buttress Turkey as our ally against whoever was our biggest enemy in Continental Europe at any given moment. The policy came to a climax with Disraeli's support for the Ottomans against Gladstone's anti-Turkish demagogy — the latter intended to inflame the radical mob. Admittedly, I have never been sure that we were entirely right to be so pro-Turk. Lord Salisbury, Disraeli's foreign secretary at the time of Gladstone's fulminations, later said that in Turkey we might have backed the wrong horse. Certainly, our century or so of support for the Turks did not stop them siding with Germany in the first world war. Still, it must have absolved us of the need to take on so formidable a foe in earlier years.

These geopolitical considerations are strangely lost on the English hooligans in Brussels, a city with a large Turkish pres- ence. A shrewd hooligan would have sought an alliance with those Turks against the Germans and, indeed, the Belgians, by whom they doubtless feel looked down on. Instead, the English, like the Germans in two world wars, have fought on too many fronts. We are also guilty of a certain unmanly complaining about our Turkish adversary. One of our lads, Mr Wayne Hodgkinson, from Nottinghamshire, was quoted in the Guardian as saying of the Turks, 'The scary thing is that these guys aren't even pissed.'

To be sober in battle seemed to strike Mr Hodgkinson as being contrary to the con- ventions of war. It was also unchivalrous of the Turks to be undrunk when at action sta- tions; for Mr Hodgkinson continued, 'They play by a totally different set of rules. It's not about having a row, running a mob and breaking a few windows. These blokes are tooled up, they've got knives.'

Presumably, when this war is over, our hooligans will hold a full inquiry into the reasons for our force's deplorable lack of knives and insufficient tooling-up during their engagements in the Low Countries against the Turks. Ideally, the inquiry will be chaired by one of Mr Straw's rioting barristers.