Will it help Boris Johnson if England does well in the Euros?

John Rentoul asks whether success on the sports field translates into national euphoria that benefits political leaders

Would an England win be a boost for the prime minister? (PA)

There are three myths about football and British politics, and they are all wrong. The easiest to dismiss is the idea that England winning the World Cup in 1966 helped Harold Wilson win the landslide election that year. The election was in March and the World Cup was in July, so that doesn’t work. It must be that, for some Labour people, the year dissolved into one happy blur in the memory.

The second myth is that Wilson’s surprise defeat by Ted Heath four years later was caused by England, the defending champions, being knocked out of the next World Cup by West Germany. At least the timetable is more plausible this time, as England, having taken a 2-0 lead in the quarter-finals, lost 3-2, and the election was four days later.

The shock from that defeat to the national prestige was seized upon by commentators trying to explain the late swing in public opinion that had taken them by surprise. As Matt Singh, the pollster for Number Cruncher Politics, explained last year, the 1970 general election was unusual in that the result was a surprise and that polling error did not seem to be the cause. A significant number of voters did seem to have changed their minds in the last few days of the campaign.

However, he thinks that the shock of Gerd Muller’s volley in Mexico is unlikely to have been a significant factor. The only poll carried out immediately after the match actually put Labour 7 percentage points ahead, the widest margin Gallup had reported for a month, and in stark contrast to the 3-point Conservative margin of victory.

Singh concludes that the bad trade figures published the day after the England defeat were more likely to have had a decisive effect, reminding voters of the balance of payments problem; and then there were also new figures showing a rise in unemployment. “What we do know points strongly towards economics, not football, deciding the 1970 election,” Singh wrote.

The third myth is that Tony Blair capitalised on the spirit of optimism of the 1996 Euros to help Labour win the general election the following year – mainly because he adapted the England song in his conference speech in Blackpool in the autumn of 1996: “Labour’s coming home. Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming.” Well, people liked the song, but England were knocked out in the semi-finals (Germany again), and there were lots of other reasons Labour won in 1997.

Even so, there is some US research, cited by Singh, that suggests sports results can affect voting behaviour. So perhaps if England win at Wembley on 11 July, Boris Johnson will, temporarily at least, get a football bounce to replace his fading vaccine boost in the opinion polls.