Jude Wanga

English identity is a funny business: we can be one thing to ourselves and something else to others, and that changes depending on mood and context. During this World Cup – and particularly when DR Congo played England – I’ve realised that I am still unsure who I am to myself, and other people.

Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.

There are severe questions to be asked of senior Manchester United executives, not least the CEO, Richard Arnold, about their handling of the Greenwood debacle, but there is no reason to imagine any other club would have handled it any better. Which is why none of them should be handling it at all.

Mental health referrals for adolescents were up 134 per cent in 2021 compared to the start of the pandemic, which saw children locked away in isolation for almost a year. Psychiatric waiting lists have increased from weeks to months. There is a chronic shortage of social workers. Teachers report being unable to cope with the mental health crisis among their students. Nearly £1 billion has been cut from government funding for the Early Intervention Grant. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services have seen a 23.5 per cent decrease in spending per person between 2015 and 2021.

On 20 July, Marcus Rashford tweeted that he had heard the Spectator was ‘planning to run a story on me tomorrow about how I have benefitted commercially in the last 18 months’. He made it clear that he had not in fact made any money from his campaigns to provide children with food, books and shelter. The article never appeared in the Spectator. On 5 August, the comedian Dannie Grufferty revealed she was the source of the bogus story, and had spent months fooling the magazine into almost running it.