Worst Take of the Week: Brexit Vs the World Cup

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1

What’s the story? Bu…bu…bu…bu…buuuuuurrrrexit!
Reasonable take: Theresa May is making a mess of this.
Devilled Eggs: Yeah, you hear that, Jeremy? You suck.

In the build-up to last year's general election, a barrister called Jolyon Maugham rose to minor prominence on Twitter as the figurehead of a few blokes who symbolised a particular strain of metropolitan liberalism. They were the Remain ultras: anti-Brexit, anti-Corbyn and pro-anyone on the spectrum from David Miliband to Tim Farron. Oh, and they were almost all called Jolyon.

Well, for the Jolyons of this world, things have gone from bad to worse since then. Corbyn is still the leader of the Labour party, and Brexit – the Fall of Rome, the end of the known-universe – is still going ahead. Now, the average Jolyon is a Tony Blair fan, so wouldn't go as far as aligning with the now hard-right Tories. Therefore, they have taken it upon themselves to channel all of their anger and frustration at the way things are going, at Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy, they reckon, has the power to stop all this, but he won’t.

"What about Brexit, Jeremy?" they are asking him in response to him wishing the UK's Muslim community a happy Eid. "What about bloody Brexit, Jeremy?" they are howling in reply to his Grenfell tribute. "What about the Brexit catastrophe, please Jeremy?" they wail in response his tweets about the murder of a 22-year-old volunteer in Gaza. All of them with #FBPE in their Twitter names, of course – which stands for "Follow Back Pro EU", by the way, in an oddly sweet MSN-messenger-esque move.

Now, their boss – the big man, Jo Maugham QC – is back to lay it out straight. You, Jeremy Corbyn, are the individual who has most influence over Brexit. Forget the Tories with their in-fighting, their power, their "being in charge of the actual negotiations" and coming up with Brexit in the first place. No, it's Jeremy Corbyn who is to blame for this. Gutless, spineless – and completely not the Prime Minister – Jeremy Corbyn.

I’m assuming his argument here is that if Corbyn came out for a second referendum, or quit and let a real grown-up like Chuka Umunna take over, then some mythical anti-Brexit swell would rise up and overthrow the whole thing. Sadly, like all Remainer wet dreams, the reality is so much more complicated. Most people still don’t know what Brexit is going to mean (including the government), most people have more pressing things to worry about (jobs, food, automation, kids, the World Cup) and more than half the population actively want it to happen. So stop talking about the will of the people. You live in a windmill in Sussex, mate.

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? The World Cup is here. It has begun.
Reasonable take: Honestly, I'm so happy. I'm so, so, so happy.
Rustler’s Chicken Burger: Oh woe betide, I see the footkick has started, folks. Millionaires kicking a ball about. I couldn’t give a rat's arse!

Here they come: the people who try to shit on major football tournaments by pretending they don’t know it's called football. Here they come, saying things like "go sports team, get the ball in the net!" Here they come, having barely caught their breath off the back of their excoriating tweets demolishing the "infernal stupidity of Love Island", dropping by to tell you couldn't give a "womble's gizzard" who wins the kicky-ball competition. Here they are, the blokes with "Whovian" in their bios.

I used to be like you in some ways. I was shit at football, so during my misspent youth I often thought it was funny to pretend I didn’t know what football was, cracking hilarious jokes like, "Wo we want the blue men to beat the red men?" That said, I only ever applied this terrible banter to the Premier League. Even I – in the depths of my unbearably smug, "Ah yes, put the ball between the posts with the netting on it" patter – never questioned the glory of the World Cup. Because whenever the World Cup came around, my pretensions fell away. I was nudged gently into acquiescence by every Pringles advert and every Radio Times pull-out wall-chart. I was also, to be clear, 14 years old.

What we're dealing with here, and what you will have to deal with for the next four weeks, is an onslaught of adults (mostly men) who have taken it upon themselves to publicly denounce football by trying to make it sound stupid. Stupid for its simplicity.

Sure, there are legitimate criticisms to be made about FIFA, corruption, VAR, whatever. But to deride a game for its simplicity is to miss the basic quality that makes the World Cup so special. Yes, it really is that simple, which is how 32 teams from every corner of the planet are able to play against each other, and why the players from those teams come from every social and economic strata imaginable. Football’s simplicity is its defining, and indestructible, quality.

"Right, so you’re telling me I’m supposed to spend the next month watching shampoo models poke a round thing around with their toes and get paid handsomely for doing so?" Yes, mate, with a pint. Yes, you are.

PRIME CUT: I’m sorry, but anyone who watches Robbie Williams perform "Feel" for Vladimir Putin and can't praise the World Cup is a rotter!

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