“Just three minutes left, it doesn’t really matter,” Kenneth Wolstenholme reassured the nation at about 4.48pm on 30 July 1966, my 15th birthday, as Geoff Hurst dragged his shot wide. At which point my father – only 41, but a man already deeply rooted to his armchair – stood up, shook his fist at the screen and shouted, “Of course it fucking matters!” A couple of minutes later, with England trying desperately to reach the haven of the final whistle, West Germany duly equalised. In the end, of course, it didn’t matter: 4-2 to the boys in red, the Jules Rimet Trophy secured, and a foundation date placed in the Brexit myth kitty.
My father, who died in 1999, would undoubtedly have voted Leave. He came from small-town Shropshire; went to a minor public school (Ellesmere College); took part in D-Day; spent most of his working life as an army officer; never to my knowledge read a novel (though I once spotted a copy of The Virgin Soldiers on his bedside table); each year, devoured the latest Whitaker’s Almanack; loved Gilbert and Sullivan; was proud of his MCC membership; went off on his own to Gibraltar to celebrate his 50th birthday; voted Conservative as a matter of course; and was the most faithful, unquestioning of Daily Telegraph readers, invariably turning first to the page announcing the latest deaths.
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