Yet in this battle between the two visions of the nation, it’s ironic that Burnham himself holds the rare distinction of having been directly scolded by his musical hero. The would-be prime minister, who once rather Pooterishly wrote that while “not in tune with his views now, I can’t deny how important Morrissey was to me”,  faced the singer’s wrath for imprecisely characterizing the 2017 Manchester bomber as merely “an extremist”.

The Manchester Arena bomb, for Morrissey “England’s 9/11”, and the subject of his unreleased song “Bonfire of Teenagers” — in which “the silly people sing: ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’… I can assure you I will look back in anger ’till the day I die” — came only two weeks into Burnham’s tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester, in what already feels like a different country. Were it to happen today, it is hard to imagine a restive public responding as warmly as it then did to the comforting platitudes of swaying “togetherness” rolled out by Burnham. In his 2024 political manifesto of no-nonsense Northernness, Head North, co-written with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham (whose own daughter was at the concert), Burnham discusses the atrocity more or less like an unfathomable act of God. Particular censure is reserved for the slow response of the emergency services, presented as yet another failure of Westminster state capacity.

That the bomber’s very presence in this country — as a member of a family granted asylum precisely due to their involvement in jihadist opposition to Gaddafi; who was himself returned to Britain from Libya by the Royal Navy while an object of interest to MI5 for his jihadist activity; and who paid for his bomb’s components with taxpayer-funded benefits doled out to his mother — of course represents an infinitely greater state failure. None of this figures in Burnham’s manifesto. Yet it is precisely this grievance — against the strange and cruel punishments that the British state, through a perverted sense of benevolence, wreaks against its own people — that has underwritten Reform’s rise and Labour’s catastrophic fall. Only in his 2025 postscript does Burnham note that, “One of the features of the age in which we live is its extreme volatility… The appalling murder of three young girls in Southport was sickeningly exploited and, for several days after, Britain felt like a country we have not known before… it feels as though we are approaching a political reckoning.” If the numbers are right, Burnham will soon find himself ruling this strange and unknown country. Yet uneasy lies the head that wears the Northern crown: according to the polls, if he enters power at all, it will only be because the threat from Reform, in this once dependable Labour heartland, has been dissipated by the electorate’s unexpectedly strong interest in the more radical Restore party.

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Burnham himself warns of the “risk” that “a progressive government could serve only one term and be replaced in 2029 by the most right-wing one Britain has ever seen”, presenting his Northern manifesto as “the Left’s only viable answer to the radical Right.” Is Burnham’s localized success replicable nationwide? As others have noted in their dissections of Burnham’s self-proclaimed “Manchesterism”, presiding over a booming and dynamic citystate is not quite the same as being the cause of its success. That the Northwest, with its Irish links so lauded by Burnham, has become the epicenter of violent revolt against the asylum system and its unintended consequences, first in Knowsley in 2023 and then after the Southport murders, suggests other narratives are possible.

Yet Burnham’s contributions to Head North are more interesting than the Westminster discourse, focused on the economics of Burnhamism, would so far imply. Buried in the text is a one-line summation of the Nairn-Anderson thesis, in which the root of British decline, and latterly its political dysfunction, is traced to the Westminster state’s anomalous failure, when compared with peer nations, to have undergone a successful bourgeois revolution.

“Britain,” Burnham declares, “unlike other countries, has never had a moment of modern nation-building. Our system of governance has slowly evolved from the feudal state, the remnants of which are still clearly visible in Parliament today.” The result, Burnham writes, is that “Britain is one of the most politically centralized and economically unbalanced countries in the developed world.” Rather over-egging Manchester’s distance from the capital — we are led to imagine him like Robert Bruce sheltering from the rain in his cave, ruminating on London’s iniquities — Burnham declares that only in his Northern exile did he reach the conclusion that “the Westminster system was our problem and, in its current form, could never be our solution”.

While Farage and his Right-wing challenger Rupert Lowe echo, in southern English accents and perhaps unconsciously, the discourse of Britain’s peripheral nationalists, Burnham’s critique of the failing Westminster state is more startlingly explicit. The Celtic comparisons are fully intended: his “experiences outside of Westminster”, he tells us, have inspired “a much better understanding of the feeling long building in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland”. He rails against an “establishment prepared to play public opinion against parts of the North of England, Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland whenever it has suited them”. He claims that “they do it because they fear nothing more than the regions and nations uniting in common cause against a system that doesn’t have their interests at heart”. The Hillsborough disaster is repeatedly likened, rather dubiously, to Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland “has big similarities to the North West of England,” Burnham asserts, without informing the curious reader what these similarities might be.

Yet Burnhamism, in its constitutional sense, represents something that does not meaningfully exist in Northern Ireland: he is an Irish Catholic Unionist, a Home Ruler through and through. This Redmondite quality comes through most clearly in his 2025 interview with Tom McTague. Proud of his great-grandfather’s self-sacrifice in the First World War, “it is Burnham’s Irish roots that help explain his British identity,” we are told, fueling “his insistence that he is British first rather than English”. Bearer of an identity more commonly found among non-white minorities and Ulster Protestants than Labour’s defected voter base, now merrily flagging their neighborhoods with St George’s Crosses, “Being British rather than English”, Burnham tells McTague, “allows him to keep all the ‘layers’ of his identity intact: British first, north-west second, Liverpool third, and English fourth.” Or English last, Morrissey might archly note.

For having outlined the similarities between the North — and for Northern England, Burnham only ever really means the urban Northwest — and the Celtic nations, Burnham suddenly tacks in a different direction: insisting that “unlike some in those places, we would never advocate for the break-up of the UK”. He thus utilizes the Nairn-Anderson thesis for novel Unionist purposes, using it to save what its originators believed could not be saved. The answer to Britain’s many problems, he argues, is a further round of devolution, breaking up England into powerful city-regions with their own hinterlands, each comparable in size to the Celtic nations. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in turn, are to be encouraged to devolve more power away from their parliaments towards their towns and cities, which, “collaborating” across the UK’s internal borders in a hazy fashion, would weaken the “inevitably tense and political” relationships between their national governments and Westminster. For all that Tony Blair’s latest intervention in national politics is read as an assault on Burnhamism, Burnham’s own constitutional experimentation is a turbo-charged Blairism, both completing New Labour’s unfinished revolution and, Burnham believes, ameliorating the centrifugal pressures it introduced.

But it is here that we see Burnham’s characteristically Labourite weak point, his absence of national feeling except towards the very Westminster state he claims to oppose. Burnham’s assertion on the outdatedness of nationalism is not borne out by political events, as the May elections showed. The very building block of electorally ascendant Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism is their sense of national sentiment and the sense of political destiny it leads towards, a destiny its adherents believe to be frustrated by Westminster rule. Rather than cooperating with a Burnham government, won over by his misty-eyed Celtic reveries and performative distaste for the capital from which he must rule, Burnham’s proposed strengthening of Unionism through devolution would present peripheral nationalists with a mortal threat. Why would they give up their hard-won power to serve explicitly Unionist ends? Why would they abandon their political projects at the behest of Westminster’s latest (and surely short-lived) ruler, thrust to power only as a result of crisis and desperation in the political center?

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And what is true of the Celtic nations is also true of England. Burnham’s analysis of the urban Northwest as the artificially suppressed engine of British modernity, laid low by the rentier capitalism of Southeast England and a creaking and antiquated Westminster state, equally overlaps with that of Tom Hazeldine in his excellent 2020 book The Northern Question. Its history punctuated by occasional rebellions, its dialects divergent from the state’s prestige form, its governance marginal to distant London, Northern England in many ways presents an analog to the Celtic nations. Yet it never developed its own comparable nationalism. The reason, Hazeldine never quite clarifies, is surely that the inhabitants of Northern England are, politically, English before they are Northern. As such, Northern English dissatisfaction has always expressed itself in trying to reform Westminster rather than seceding from it: and for all that he claims to be Northern first and English second, this is also Burnham’s chosen path.

Yet to save the United Kingdom, Burnham must carve up England, an instinctively conservative country, into a collection of urban metropoles whose cosmopolitan voters will outweigh their suburban and rural hinterlands in the exercise of power. Why would Reform, with its keen if unspoken appreciation of the demographic limits of its appeal, agree to such gerrymandering? Perhaps the march of history compels us, Burnham muses: “If the nineteenth century was the century of empire, and the twentieth was the century of the nation state, the new thinking was that the twenty-first would be led by a network of cities around the world,” he declares, revealing himself as less a daring avatar of national rebirth than as a provincial Sadiq Khan.

We can, no doubt, expect all manner of constitutional novelties from a future Burnham premiership. In its terminal throes, Labour is making the explicit choice to replace a leader who believes the Westminster state still fundamentally functions with one who demands “nothing less than a complete rewiring of Britain”: even Labour now accepts that Britain needs reform. Yet beyond England — for Burnham merely an unappealing menu option between dynamic city-states, the wider Union and an even greater European union still — none of the dominant peripheral nationalist parties have anything to gain from Burnham’s vision of “the regions and nations uniting in common cause”: unless it is to accrue more power, to be utilized in the service of secession. A Westminster creature through and through, to save the Labour project it is England Burnham must dismantle, whose own brewing bourgeois revolution he feels history commands him to suppress. If Northern England is now the engine of the nation’s politics, its voters’ ever more determinedly-expressed wishes present far more of a threat to Burnhamism than an endorsement.

Nevertheless, there is something, and potentially something of great power, to be found in appealing to shared conceptions of British identity beyond the reach or confines of the Westminster system. Yet attempting to do so from Whitehall, exerting power through the same system he condemns, will prove as challenging for Burnham as it later will for Farage. Once ensconced in Downing Street, he will no longer be the King in the North, but just another Labour prime minister, trying and failing to manipulate the broken levers of the state. More likely, the English revolt will soon do for Burnham as it already has for Starmer. Even so, Burnham is significant as a waypoint on the road we are condemned to travel: it is a marker of our political moment that to rule from Westminster, our next prime minister must claim to despise it.

The triumph of neoliberal ideology — obliterating any hope for the proletarian Bohemia espoused by Morrissey and co. — left in its wake a world of obligatory positivity, of mandatory self-promotion, of endless canned laughter. By the time I was old and depressed enough to want to listen to the band, their stature had only grown. With no one around quite able to fill their boots, they’d become even more of a lifeline to those in search of personality in a world on the bore.

In 2005, I moved from student accommodation into a houseshare in Archway, North London. In halls, there were enough of you to avoid one another. It’s only once six of you shack up in the same building that you find your people. I realized pretty quickly that a guy named Gregg was my people. Picture a Smiths obsessive starting his second year at uni in your head, and there he is: thick-rimmed specs, cardigan, delicate yet cumbersome, literate, pale, ultra-sensitive, achingly mystified by sex and wandering around Sainsbury’s on a sullen Tuesday afternoon defacing the avocados in the name of Palestinian justice. He played the band constantly. They didn’t make sense to me at first. Morrissey’s voice felt monochromatic, overwrought, lacking in subtlety. It was too much, this incessant melodramatic moan. They didn’t make sense to me until I needed them to. Until the mud and murk of animal desire had reduced me to a kind of whimpering paste.

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My friendship with Gregg took a turn for the worse when I became aware of my superior value in the sexual marketplace. When both of us were total no-hopers, we couldn’t have been closer. Then I met Millie. I lost interest in Gregg. I had cocaine to snort and parties to attend with my beautiful new hipster girlfriend. I used to think about Gregg downstairs in his Smiths dungeon, while Millie and I canoodled in the room above his head. He used to roll his TV up close enough to his bed so that he could watch it with headphones attached. This way he could enjoy fully sound-tracked porn without the rest of the house clocking on. I used to think of him down there, plugged into that box, while Millie and I plugged into one another. I knew his suffering: it had up until moments ago been my own. Still, somehow, I found his pain added to my pleasure.

Then Millie left me for another boy. I’d grown lazy, entitled, bored — a lifelong pattern asserting itself for the first time. My mentality was a long way from catching up with my biology, to paraphrase Mozza on Meat is Murder. The boredom was supplanted by raging, bitter desire once I knew I’d been replaced. I was suddenly beneath where Gregg had been. Gregg’s world looked idyllic from the fresh hell of jealousy I’d stumbled into. I wanted no more part in this sordid, bloodthirsty competition. In that moment, I wished I could obliterate sex from the world. What was left of my innocence was gone. At moments such as these only The Smiths suffice. Somehow only Morrissey seems to understand.

I was asked during an interview last year what I made of his politics, clearly a reference to recent provocations. I didn’t care about his politics, I responded. I don’t go to pop stars for politics, I go to them with heartbreak, and no one has done more for the broken-hearted than Morrissey. In retrospect, though, that response seems insufficient. For it’s only by dint of Morrissey’s political sensitivities that he was able to relieve so much heartache in the first place. Splicing the wit of Oscar Wilde with droll proletarian kitchen sink drama, the long-term loners and unemployables of his songs are suddenly able to seal themselves off from their lack of prospects in aristocratic futility: No, I never had a job because I never wanted one. Through humor and wordplay, disenchantment is made regal: Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over…

The Smiths nailed that dread, so familiar to youth, at submitting yourself to this gray machine which longs to turn you into itself. I think for a lot of young men getting into The Smiths is like being given permission to finally feel too much — Why do you sleep alone tonight? Because tonight is just like any other night. It’s not just pathetic to stew in your woundedness. It’s also human. It’s also hard proof you’re actually here. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary: your ineptitude might well be something to celebrate, might well be a form of insurrection.

The sensitivity required to concoct such a body of work and at so young an age is breathtaking. That obvious sensitivity also renders it difficult to work out the level of seriousness with which to take Morrissey’s constant thumb-in-eye public aggravations. He’s too intelligent not to know what he’s doing. Claiming Richard Madeley married his own mother, calling for the head of Elton John, suggesting Jamie Oliver eat his own kids — you’d have to have a heart of stone to read this stuff and not laugh. His vegan fundamentalism sometimes leads him into more complex waters, however. In particular, his endorsement of For Britain — a party alluded to even by Farage as “Nazi”.

It’s weird that the anti-establishment post-punk icon of Irish immigrant stock should move to LA forever, then become obsessed with how many Muslims there are in Bradford. Is he genuinely so concerned for the welfare of animals that he’ll lay down with dogs? It is possible. Or has he just become a bit of a curmudgeon? Nostalgia was always a key element with The Smiths, from the album covers of old film stars to the elaborate croon to the high romantic lyrical stylings. Is this unchecked nostalgia turning into regression perhaps? What kind of England is he advocating for anyway? Suet puddings? Vicars on bicycles? Whistling bobbies on the beat?

I think it was Shaun Ryder who once summed up his acerbic inclinations best: “it’s just Morrissey being Morrissey.” Morrissey is the ultimate fan. He always has been. Having written literature on James Dean, and set up the unofficial New York Dolls fan club before fame, to this day he can still be found penning elegant tributes to his favorite artists. Everyone begins as a fan. Everyone in art supplicates themselves before other art, before going on to make it themselves. In a sense, artists are just psychotically dedicated fans.

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The ultimate goal is a kind of closed-circuit fandom. A self-replenishing, self-sustaining vortex of adulation, with you at the core. Ideally, you become a fan of yourself. A ritualized, masochistic enslavement to one’s idols — if you have what it takes, you might eventually be able to convert into a ritualized, masochistic enslavement to one’s own image. Morrissey strayed beyond this singularity some time ago. He’s started looking at Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace, thinking: “I want me some of that action.” Like all great egotists (see “Ye” for the mentally ill variety), only crucifixion will suffice when it comes to bringing the curtain down. Martyrdom or bust. It’s not enough that we love him, he wants all of our feelings, he wants our loathing too. Spare a thought for what it must be like to live like that. We can simply switch Morrissey off when we’re sick of him. He can never leave his creation.

Morrissey could go as far as calling for the removal of all Muslims and peoples of Muslim descent from the British Isles — he could go as far as to single out the polluting effects of me and the rest of the Algerian diaspora specifically — I would still have love for him. That last bit might actually increase my love for him — I’ve been trying to suss out how to get my dad deported for years. I dare say within our sanitized media landscape having someone around that’s willing to “play the villain” is far from a bad thing.

No, he’d have to inflict serious personal wounds for me to turn my back on him; he’d have to run my own mother down in his car then lie about it. For this tender Mancunian gob-shite is always there for us when we need him most. When the storm clouds of betrayal, self-hate and prolapsed pride begin brewing, he’s there waiting for us, the exact bon mot to hand. People forget that in a hurry it seems. That they can help themselves to the tonic of Mozza as and when it suits them, then calmly place him back on the shelf until the next time we think we know it’s over.

It wasn’t one of Morrissey’s more successful gigs. He was the support act at a much-anticipated reunion of Madness, a band who drew a very different crowd to him, and he wasn’t entirely appreciated. He looked increasingly displeased, truncated his set, and then withdrew from the second of the two nights, complaining about “the abysmal behaviour of a small group of loathsome yobbos”. (He later refined this to “a small selection of rather dull North Londoners”.) Meanwhile in America, tickets for his forthcoming show at the Hollywood Bowl sold out in 23 minutes, beating the record set by the Beatles. Now he knew how Jesus felt: a prophet being without honour in his own country and among his own kin.

It was ironic, then, that “Glamorous Glue” should have been, in part, a lament for a lost British culture, swamped by a wave of Americanisation. “London is dead,” he sang — to fans of the most London act this side of Ian Dury (also on the bill).

It wasn’t the Union Jack that irked the hostile sections of the crowd. Their reaction was more to do with long hours of drinking, an impatience to relive their younger days with the Nutty Boys, and a suspicion of a bloke from Manchester wearing a gold-lamé shirt, split to the waist, prancing about in front of images of androgynous-looking skinhead girls. The previous year Morrissey had said his perfect audience would be “skinheads in nail polish”, but there weren’t many of them in Finsbury Park 30 years ago.

On the other hand, it very definitely was the Union Jack that provoked the NME to devote its front cover and five inside pages — some 6,000 words — to that question of whether he’d gone too far this time. Because the flag had been seen as deeply suspect in Leftish culture for some time. It conjured up images of the Empire, now regarded as a Bad Thing in progressive circles, and it had become associated with extreme-Right groups. There was a fine line between patriotism and racism, and the national flag was seen to sprawl all over it. There was, proclaimed the NME, no room for irony when it came to “the Union Jack, with all its ambiguities”. The paper’s charge sheet against Morrissey cited song lyrics and quotes from interviews, to show that he had long been “toying with far-Right/fascist imagery, and even of racism itself”, with the flag as the last straw. Stopping short of calling him a racist, the paper concluded that “he has continued to pick away at the scab of race relations”.

Revisited three decades on, the striking feature of the NME’s denunciation is how dated it all seems for the time. The reference points are those of the Seventies: skinheads, football hooligans, the National Front. And there’s mention of previous transgressors Eric Clapton and David Bowie, whose comments in 1976 had prompted the creation of Rock Against Racism. (Clapton had spoken in support of Enoch Powell; Bowie nominated himself as a fascist dictator for Britain.) It feels like a rear-view mirror, looking back to the dawn of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when post-punk pop could be both oppositional and successful, and when the circulation of the NME was twice what it now was. It’s like the last shout of a passing era.

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Ten months later, a new Manchester band, Oasis, began circulating a demo tape, the cover of which had an image of the Union Jack swirling towards the centre as though disappearing down a plughole. “It’s the greatest flag in the world and it’s going down the shitter,” explained Liam Gallagher. “We’re here to do something about it.” It wasn’t long before the Union Jack was all over popular music, from Noel Gallagher’s guitar and Geri Halliwell’s mini-dress to David Bowie’s distressed frock-coat designed by Alexander McQueen. A new day had dawned, had it not?

In this era of cultural branding — Britpop, Cool Britannia, the YBAs — the Union Jack was flown proudly as the national trademark. The associations now were with the Swinging Sixties, when Britain was losing an empire and finding a new role as purveyor of music, movies and style to the world, when the flag had been ubiquitous, celebrated as a classic design by commerce and culture alike. In the Nineties resurgence of popular culture, the Union Jack spoke of Peter Blake and The Who rather than Enoch Powell or the Raj.

And where culture went, politics was sure to follow. Tony Blair’s speech to the 1996 Labour conference ended with a projection of the flag, much to the horror of the old Left. “It was the National Front,” shuddered Tony Benn, in his diary, “and it made me absolutely sick.” But Benn was stuck in the past as well, and couldn’t appreciate that things were different now. The title of Blair’s recently published book spelt it out: New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The Union Jack was the symbol of this reborn nation. “We have reclaimed the flag,” declared Peter Mandelson. “It is restored as an emblem of national pride and diversity. Restored from years as a symbol of division and intolerance.”

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It was fun, it was colourful, it had no baggage, none of those “ambiguities” that once troubled the NME, because New Labour memories were too short to include the imperial past. Admittedly, there was a moment when one of Blair’s speeches in the 1997 election campaign was initially written to address a longer history, but only in celebratory terms: “I am proud of the British Empire.” And even that didn’t happen, because Robin Cook, the shadow Foreign Secretary, had the sentence deleted from the draft.

Meanwhile, the fear of neo-Nazis had receded so far that the Euro 96 football tournament even saw the Cross of St George adopted by England fans. This wasn’t a reclaiming, since it had never been much-used except by the far-Right. It became sufficiently popular to attract politicians, and, come Euro 2004, Downing Street itself was flying the St George Cross — believed to be for the first time ever — to celebrate England’s triumphant progress to a quarter-final defeat on penalties. It annoyed some Scots, but it was typical of Blair’s gesture populism.

Just as characteristic was that Gordon Brown should decide to fly the same flag over Downing Street on St George’s Day 2008. Brown worried a good deal that the English might take against him for being so Scottish, but his fears were just an acute form of New Labour’s wider obsession with being seen as patriotic. Seeking to spike Tory guns, Blair’s party laid claim to the entire nation. “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole,” declared the manifesto in 1997. “Our values are the same: the equal worth of all, with no one cast aside; fairness and justice within strong communities.”

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If that seemed a little vague, there was no greater precision forthcoming. Blair later talked about “standing up for British values — for example, rights coupled with responsibilities, duty, fair play and open-mindedness”, which got us precisely nowhere. His spokesperson blurred the picture even more: “Britishness to us is about issues as varied as how you manage the economy, the approach you take to issues like unemployment, your vision of society.” And Brown merely reheated the same thin gruel, speaking of “common qualities and common values that have made Britain the country it is.” If none of it quite made sense, you could always clutch at the flag to cover a multitude of meanderings. For a while, bolstered by the imagery of Cool Britannia, it did help deflect criticism of a government that sought greater integration into the European Union, that encouraged immigration on an unprecedented level, that allowed the US to set its foreign policy.

But the tide was turning, both culturally and politically. There was a slow Tory resurgence: from their low-point in 1997, they increased their share of the vote in the next six elections. And by the time of the 2009 European Parliament elections — when Labour was beaten into third place by Ukip and the BNP picked up close to a million votes — the talk was of recession, illegal war, MPs’ expenses and grooming gangs.

If the NME’s attack on Morrissey provided a full stop to a period of politically engaged, alternative culture, then Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics did the same for Cool Britannia and New Labour. Which is why it’s so fondly remembered by so many, a last hurrah for a happier time. The Industrial Revolution, the NHS, post-1960 popular culture — it was enough to make you feel proud of a creative, communal, cool nation.

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Things are different now. Flags are different.

On the day of the Rochester & Stroud by-election in November 2014, Emily Thornberry tweeted a photo of a white van parked outside a nondescript yellow-brick house, on the side of which hung three St George flags. The picture was captioned “Image from #Rochester”, and it was widely seen as being a patronising, Islingtonian sneer. Even as Ukip was winning the by-election, Thornberry resigned from her post as shadow attorney general, and historian turned Labour MP Tristram Hunt spelt out the official position: “We are hugely in favour in the Labour Party of people expressing pride in their national identity and national symbols.”

No one was convinced. No one believed for a second that Hunt, let alone Thornberry, would ever dream of draping a flag from their own houses. It wasn’t the kind of thing that was done in polite society, and anyway the flags — both the Union Jack and the St George Cross — were again being treated with suspicion: they were, to put it bluntly, a bit Ukip-y.

This is all the more so since the 2016 referendum, of course. The Union Jack is now seen by some — on both sides — as anti-European. A photo of it on Twitter will prompt a wave of denunciations of “flag-shaggers” (often from those with an EU flag in their profile). And since the creative industries — to use Blairite terminology — were and still are predominantly pro-Remain, popular culture takes a less celebratory line. The modern equivalent of Geri Halliwell’s frock at the 1997 Brit Awards was Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, designed by Banksy, at Glastonbury in 2019, a much darker vision of the nation. The artists and musicians have moved on.

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All of which gives Sir Keir Starmer a problem. Post-Brexit, post-Corbyn, like Blair he’s anxious to assert his patriotic credentials. But popular culture isn’t with him, and the brazen flag-waving of the Nineties isn’t appropriate now. Instead, he treats the Union Jack with reverence, a furled flag on either side of the quasi-presidential podium for a speech, or next to him behind a statesman’s desk as he talks frankly and seriously to the nation. It’s meant to be prime ministerial, but that also means that he’s using the same imagery as the actual prime minister, both the current incumbent and his likely successor. In his glory years, Blair went further than that, arguing that it was the Tories who were unpatriotic: “It is no good waving the fabric of the flag when you have spent 16 years tearing apart the fabric of our nation.”

On the other hand, the Union Jack has made a notable comeback in retail circles. Culture and commerce have parted company. As the post-Brexit advertising for Vauxhall cars — “a British brand since 1903” — suggests, the market is convinced that there’s mileage in the old flag yet. The meat aisle in Aldi is adorned with the Union Jack, and it appears on products from milk and chicken thighs to Shreddies and strawberries — even on sugar that has been grown and refined abroad but packaged in Britain. It’s also to be found on Scotch beef, to the irritation of those Scottish nationalists who would rather see the use of the Saltire. And, presumably, to the fury of the militantly vegan Morrissey.

People try to interpret their breakup as some dramatic conflict, but it was maybe more like the moment in your own life, when you realise that your family members are just random human beings trapped in a house together, and the sooner you’re out of it, the better.

*

Johnny Marr is a genius, and so is Morrissey. There had to be a moment somewhere in the initial sequencing of The Smiths’s DNA when one band member said to the others about Morrissey, “But mate, he’s like so incredibly, you know, um, how shall I phrase this, different. What are we supposed to do with him?” And then the other two probably shrugged and then decided to just run with it.

No offence to the other two, but, having been pulled from the want ads, they probably were a little bit replaceable/generic. And it must have been very rankling, indeed, for Morrissey and Marr to have to pony up £1 million to pay off the drummer who retroactively sued for back-royalties when he found out he was only getting 10% of the profits. Morrissey and Marr got 40% each. In his autobiography, Morrissey spends an astonishing amount of time describing that lawsuit and his incremental realisation that he was likely going to lose. That had to hurt on a few levels. Decades later, nobody even knows the drummer’s name or cares.

*

What I like about The Smiths is that they mixed corny with cool. Contrast How Soon is Now with Frankly Mr. Shankly. They were all over the map, but then so were The Beatles, and even The Smiths’s crap B-sides were better than most bands’ singles.

*

The Smiths to me represented a kind of revenge of the suburbs, where the children raised in Milton Keynes and Pasadena got back at society for coddling them, like in J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild. There was this moment in the late Seventies and early Eighties when a hundred million young people worldwide collectively decided to leave home — no, flee home as quickly as they could. The hippies were dead to them. Punk was a dead end. New Wave meant an actual new wave of being that was a rejection of the state and false utopian thinking.

There is a toughness to people who came of age in that era, a wariness of all systems that organically flowed from being a certain age and watching all forms of order implode or decay while “the answer”, the peace and love of the hippies, was utterly useless. “Hang the DJ” was like a battle cry when the Lord of the Flies children decide to kill Piggy.

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The thing with Morrissey is the nagging feeling you get when you think back to how he was right about so many things back in the past, things like vegetarianism and veganism, as well as his proto-woke sense of underdoggism. I draw the line at saying prophetic, but he was definitely ahead of his time.

Morrissey expressed his essential Morrisseyness inside of what was still a music world filled with rock normative prejudices. His utter alienness was his protective coating. People were so busy trying to understand what was actually going on inside his head that they didn’t think to simply punch him. But it seems as though, as the years rolled on, people took less and less time to think about what he was doing, and the urge to punch him became almost instantaneous.

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The Simpsons did an episode about The Smiths (“The Snuffs”) which was astonishingly cruel to Morrissey. It really went way too far: shame on them. Sure, Morrissey’s a dick, but he’s always on brand when he’s a dick, and that prickliness is why we love him.

But then there’s his racism which is at such odds with his peace love and understanding persona, yet people tend to cut him some slack and chalk it up to the same gene that makes our parents crank up the racism in their late fifties. That’s right: Morrissey is old, which means you’re old, too. So, in a weird way, Morrissey (I hate it when people call him Moz) is cancel-proof. Like Donald Trump, he inhabits his own universe, and he genuinely doesn’t care.

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Can you even imagine what a flaming radioactive mess a Smiths reunion tour might be like? It’s like contemplating the square root of negative one, or dark matter. There’s just no point.

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I did my only interviewer gig ever with Morrissey in Rome in 2006. I’d been heavily using the sleep drug zopiclone for the first time ever in the days leading up to the interview. Meanwhile, the record company had been so paranoid about interviewers bootlegging an advance of Morrissey’s new songs that they only sent me CDs that were so heavily watermarked that they wouldn’t play in any device in the US or Canada. When I got to Rome, the company let me listen to the new album on some weird sound system that was like something out of the former DDR. And then, six hours early, they rang my room to say that Morrissey was bored and wanted to do his interview right then.

As he walked into the hotel’s basement bar where the interview took place, my zopiclone massively kicked in and I remember seeing Morrissey’s head balloon in size like a Christmas parade balloon in New York. Then I blacked out and suddenly it was another six hours later, and I was on the phone with my agent in New York, when I snapped out of the zopiclone blackout and said: WTF just happened? There’s no real moral here. But if they’d just given me the fucking album a week earlier, I could have written something a bit better about the whole cosmic clusterfuck of an experience in Rome.

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Which is all to say that nobody ever compares Morrissey’s solo albums to The Smiths’ albums. But the solo albums are really, really good, and Morrissey doesn’t get enough credit for that. Viva Hate (1988) was astonishing, and Kill Uncle (1991) was excellent. With Your Arsenal (1992) his bus started to veer towards some nearby cliff, but then a few albums later, Ringleaders of the Tormentors (2006), the album I was in Rome for, showed great song writing and performing talent once more. Solo Morrissey is a boutique listening experience, albeit one that will endure.

In my mind The Smiths were 75% Morrissey, 24% Johnny Marr and 1% the others. I hear Johnny Marr has done great stuff since the band split. I assume it’s excellent and wish him well. But the sum of the band’s isolated solo efforts isn’t greater than their whole. So many of us miss The Smiths and we always will. Missing The Smiths is like missing that Christmas dinner where everyone screamed at each other and behaved appallingly and damaged crockery and said untakebackable things, and yet ever since all other Christmas dinners seem listless and fake and dull. What a shame, and so needless, to miss them while they’re still here. It’s like they ghosted all of us when they ghosted each other.