Premiership Quotes

May loses her majority and is effectively left on life support for the rest of her premiership. (Boris Johnson spends a lot of time hanging around the plug socket looking shifty.)

Deaner ran down to the barrier separating the crowd from the pitch, and eventually persuaded the stewards that he had a part to play in the unfolding drama. (Anyone who has ever attempted to talk to a steward at a Premiership football ground will recognize that, whatever else during the afternoon required divine intervention, Deaner’s success in getting on to the White Hart Lane turf really was a miracle.)

Manchester United would have retained the Premiership if they’d won this game – or, of course, if they’d won any of the other games they drew during the course of the season. Or, seeing as one extra point would have done the trick, if they’d drawn any of the games they lost, especially the two against Manchester City. Or, seeing as they lost the trophy on goal difference, if their victories had been achieved with a bigger winning margin.

Several Watford supporters disgracefully started leaving the ground, and the Arsenal surprised us by adding another chant to their repertoire – making a total of two chants if my mathematics serves me correctly. 'You might as well go home.' What they don’t realise, of course, is that we are home. Watford’s not a pretty place, but its home. I live a half-hour walk from Vicarage Road. The chant went up from our end, 'We support our local team,' which always shuts up Premiership supporters from Borehamwood, Radlett and Surrey, no matter which of the top four teams they follow.

Thus it is wrong to think that the British Establishment wholeheartedly supported Churchill’s premiership in the darkest days of the Second World War: it tolerated him for the lack of a viable alternative and because he was still popular with the public. It also refused to acknowledge that many of the defeats for which he was being blamed were directly attributable to the failure to heed his warnings and adopt his rearmament proposals in the 1930s. At a deeper level, he could not be forgiven for having been proved right about their flagship policy of those years: appeasement.

However, for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound “free will,” that this “free will” is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free. Like Einstein and Dawkins, an illiterate maid also has free will, and therefore on election day her feelings—represented by her vote—count just as much as anybody else’s. Feelings guide not just voters but their leaders as well. In the 2016 Brexit referendum the Leave campaign was headed by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. After David Cameron resigned, Gove initially supported Johnson for the premiership, but at the very last minute Gove declared Johnson unfit for the position and announced his own intention to run for it. Gove’s action, which destroyed Johnson’s chances, was described as a Machiavellian political assassination.4 But Gove defended his conduct by appealing to his feelings, explaining, “In every step in my political life I have asked myself one question: ‘What is the right

As Wheen has pointed out, ‘In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970… a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five.’27 Thus, on either side of the momentous decision to join the European project, Britain was in crisis mode. These five national emergencies may have planted the seeds of one of the tropes that would surface in the coming decades and flower in Brexit: the idea that Britain was, in some way, still at war.

It was a paradox that, although he worked for the Prime Minister, Agent 15 knew far more about the way government worked than Byron did, and he wasn’t alone. There were hundreds of people that really controlled the country, silently manoeuvring it into position like the path of a giant container ship. Quite often the captain at the helm knew little about what was going on in the engine room, unless it was impossible for him not to know. This was one of those occasions. All concerned would have preferred if their activities remained concealed from the other in case the situation was made permanent. The Prime Minister knew now, and he did have the power to change it permanently. Unbeknown to him, they also had the power to remove him if they so wished. In a battle of hundreds against one, the power of one will generally lose. It was the first time in Byron’s premiership that he realised that the well-run ship was not being powered by him, just steered.

How the hell does somebody open a nightclub in Manchester and not get a Premiership footballer? Half the population of this town must be footballers – it’s all they’ve bloody got to do up here.

In principle – and after Nehru – in practice, the choice came to be posed simply: either democracy had to be curtailed, and the intellectual, directive model of development pursued more vigorously (one of the supposed rationales offered for the Emergency of the mid-1970s); or democracy had to be maintained along with all its cumbersome constraints, and the ambition of a long-term developmental project abandoned. The striking point about the seventeen years of Nehru’s premiership was his determination to avoid this stark choice. Any swerve from democracy was ruled out; the intellectual arguments had, however, to be upheld. The claims of techne, the need for specialist perspectives on economic development, were lent authority by the creation in 1950 of an agency of economic policy formulation, insulated from the pressures of routine democratic politics: the Planning Commission. Discussions of national progress were by now being formulated in the technical vocabulary of economics, which made them wholly unintelligible to most Indians. The task of translation was entrusted to the civil service, and as the algebra of progress moved down the echelons, it was mangled and diluted. The civil service itself provoked deep ambivalence among nationalists: mistrusted because of its colonial paternity, but respected for its obvious competence and expertise. In the 1930s Nehru had called for a radical transformation of the Indian Civil Service in a free India, though by the time independence actually arrived he had become decidedly less belligerent towards it. It was Patel who had stood up for the civil servants after 1947, speaking thunderously in their favour in the Constituent Assembly. But by the early 1950s Nehru had himself turned more wholeheartedly towards them: he hoped now to use them against the obstructions raised by his own party. The colonial civil-service tradition of fiscal stringency was preserved during the Nehru period, but the bureaucracy was now also given explicitly developmental responsibilities.

He’d cried a bit when he sat down, then stared off into the sky once he’d done so, thinking about, of all things, Sheffield United, and the realisation that if they ever got back into the Premiership then he wouldn’t be around to see it. That had nearly set him off again, but instead, he’d had a thought that made him smirk in the darkness. Even without the Stone Men’s arrival, he didn’t think he’d have lived to see that. Paul

TWEET OF THE DAY “Kiss sent off for punching Jesus,” tweeted Hamilton Academicals during their 2-1 defeat to Ross County in the Scottish Premiership, causing a stir online. As it turned out, Filip Kiss, the County defender, had indeed struck Hamilton’s Jesús García Tena.

We made too much comedy of our differences and placed too much meaning on our similarities. It was flirting to a Premiership standard.

Until the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, the committees were shrouded in secrecy. No details were given about them:

Shaun McManus: By the time we played the demolition derby we weren’t travelling that well, but they weren’t either. The Eagles had champions who had won premierships in 1992 and 1994 but I felt that by 2000 they had some pretenders out there who were basking in the glory of things they hadn’t done - things that had been done by people who had gone before them.