David Beckham a hero? Don't make me laugh

The media correspondent of The Spectator, Stephen Glover, was writing about David Beckham the other day. Well, no, that's not true. He was writing about a piece written by Lord Rees-Mogg about David Beckham. Apparently, Lord Rees-Mogg had said that it would be a shame if the great David Beckham left Manchester United and went to Real Madrid, because Britain would be losing a hero.

Glover metaphorically let his jaw go slack, took off his cap, scratched his hair, shook his head, opened his eyes wide, took a deep breath and did all the other things that people traditionally do when they are gobsmacked, and said he couldn't believe that Rees-Mogg, an essayist he venerated, had done anything so shallow as fall for the cult of celebrity.

"To say that England would lose a hero if David Beckham left is a piece of madness; and to see the thought issue from the magnificent brain of William Rees-Mogg makes me want to cry out in pain."

Rees-Mogg, Glover reminded us at inordinate length, has done this once before, 30 years ago, when he had defended Mick Jagger. But David Beckham "is no Mick Jagger. He is a vain, inarticulate, media-manipulating young man who has nothing to say or to contribute to our culture beyond his prowess as a footballer".

Well, up to a point, Lord Glover. Leaving aside just how this would make him so different from Mick Jagger, I can see at least two ways in which Beckham is quite significant in British culture, neither of which seems to have struck Rees-Mogg or Glover.

One is that if Beckham was to go to Madrid, it would be the first time for some years that an English player was deemed good enough to play for a Continental side. We like to think that we English are good footballers. Then why is it that nobody else thinks so? Not enough, at any rate, to want to actually buy English footballers. The only class footballer from England I can think of offhand who is playing for a top European side is Steve McManaman at Real Madrid, and even he is not commanding a regular first-team place. So if Beckham were to move abroad, it would be a sign that somebody somewhere thought that an English player was worth exporting.

In other words, a near-miracle. (As much of a miracle as if there was an English Premiership side with no non-English players in it.)

The other significant thing about David Beckham is that he is a wonderful example of how a man can swing from being a laughing-stock to being a hero. To listen to Rees-Mogg and others blather on about his iconic nature, you would think he had always had heroic stature, had always been the cool England captain, the master of style, the man to whom other men look up. But only a few years ago he was the man people scorned, the village idiot of modern British humour who turned out to be a simpleton in every story about him, equalled only by the simplicity of his wife Victoria.

I am sure by now everyone has heard the story about David Beckham that ends with someone saying, "It's not a jigsaw puzzle, David. It's a packet of corn flakes", and a credit to the ingenuity of British humour it is. There were hundreds of cruel jokes like that about the man, all the same kind of joke that people used to tell about Skoda cars or even whole nations – indeed, the Irish comedian Ed Byrne once said on TV: "Everyone in Ireland gives thanks to God for David Beckham, because the British are now telling the jokes about him which you used to tell about us."

There seemed to be no evidence for any stupidity on his part to justify it. But then there was never any evidence that the Irish were stupid. What the British, and especially the English, like to do is tell demeaning stories about someone, and it doesn't much matter who. Political correctness (and the appearance of lots of very clever Irish comedians) made it hard to make fun of the Irish, so we had to find someone else. For a while the Welsh got some of the flak, but it never quite caught on, so we turned to David Beckham as a butt.

But Beckham has bravely outgrown and outlived this. And the crucial question about David Beckham, as far as British culture is concerned, is not whether he will go to Madrid or not. It is this: who are the English telling those jokes about now?