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Nobody is more excited for the football goal contest than I, come on you Home Nations, by Sir Keir Starmer

By Sir Keir Starmer, prime minister and fan of the Arsenals

JUST like the rest of the country, I can’t wait to see if the football will return to where it came from originally. Let’s hope those jewels remain still gleaming.

Only a cynic would assume I’m relaxing licensing hours for the World Cup to win over voters. That’s as untrue as I’m still prime minister. I’ve actually done it because I love the funny old game of two halves. ‘On my head, son,’ as they say.

Nothing makes me feel more cheery than a ‘striker’ placing a football in an onion bag. And if the forward comes from the United Kingdom, even better. After all, a win for England is a win for Team GB!

You’ll see a different side to me over the next few weeks. The cool, controlled Starmer you know and love will loosen up a bit. Don’t be worried if you spot little Union Jacks flying from my suit pockets or catch me supping a half. Because I contract footie fever.

I’m not just saying this because I’m the prime minister, but I really think Britain can score the most football points and win the league. So long as we stick to the classic forty-two formation and don’t go offside then the victor’s caps are as good as ours.

Imagine how good that would feel. Finally triumphing at soccer after 60 hurt years. I’d award the nation a bank holiday and knight whoever set up the winning kick.

Of course, as every fan knows, it’s the taking part that counts. So if Brazil scores from one of their famous set-piece corner penalties? There’s always another World Cup next year.

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What tabloids were like in the 80s: an embarrassed dad explains

MY teenage son has asked if red-top newspapers really behaved like that in the 1980s when I was a boy delivering them. He’s not going to f**king believe this: 

Yes, they used to count down to a 16-year-old exposing her breasts

It just… wasn’t uncommon. Gave the working man on the bus something to look forward to. Look, Samantha Fox was 16 when she became a Page 3 girl and she was nationally famous. The age of consent was 16 and, well, that’s as far as our thinking went. In my defence I was 13 at the time, so as far as I was concerned I had a thing for older women.

Yes, there was endless speculation about the sex lives of teenagers

The girls mentioned above obviously and various others, like the ‘Wild Child’ phenomenon. Who were they? They were these girls aged about 13 or so who went out in nightclubs stripping and getting drunk and having sex with older men. One of them married a Rolling Stone. We assumed it was all of their own volition. I now realise wrongly.

Yes, ‘poofs’ was considered appropriate to use in a headline

What does it mean? Gay people, but don’t assume that such a light, fluffy word it wasn’t used in a vicious, hateful way. It absolutely was. It was regularly demanded that ‘poofs’ be sacked from any job, evicted from any housing and deported, especially if they were thought to be carrying ‘the gay plague’. Look, I’m just telling you what happened.

There were regular stories about sex vicars

What’s a sex vicar? Well, a vicar who has sex when he’s not supposed to, ie outside of a loving marriage to a mumsy woman. Instead he’s in a Soho peepshow, or having sex with a man in a toilet, or running off with the 16-year-old daughter of a parishioner, or disgracing himself in some other way. They were sort of celebrated. For shagging.

The problem page was a short photo story about sex

Every problem page features numerous made-up letters about sex and a photo story, running throughout a whole week, about a couple’s sexual problems. It was never just ‘my husband’s not interested’. It was always ‘my husband’s shagging the teenager next door and I’m having a lesbian affair with the vicar’s wife’. Not sure what the advice was.

Whole categories of society were scum

Poofs obviously, miners, all football fans, anyone who dared to be on strike including the printers of the tabloids themselves, students, lefties, layabouts, foreigners, foreigners over here, Russkies, Trots, every day there was a new category of people to hate. So pretty much like social media today, but a bit more undisguised and vitriolic.

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