Dan Snow’s diary: Making World Cup history

Could there be a more timely advert for the Better Together campaign than on the field of sport? What the England football team manifestly need is the man who is now the best British player, an offensive winger with the speed of a cheetah and the tactical brain of Rommel — proud Welshman, proud Brit, Gareth Bale. My obsession during international sports tournaments is to find appropriate historic parallels for every game. Holland made it easy for me with a destruction of Spain reminiscent of the 1639 annihilation of the Spanish fleet at the Battle of the Downs off the east coast of Kent: a decisive clash that ended conclusively the age of Spanish naval hegemony. I was looking for an England performance against Italy akin to Boudicca’s rout of the IX Legion. We got Caesar’s 54 bc invasion, a sharp defeat, which was not terminal, but leaves all with a dark inevitability about future clashes.

People tend to take from history only what they need for the present. I was in Normandy last week for the D-day commemorations, and was struck by what D-day meant to people. For many, it represents a totemic national triumph. Onlookers on the beaches spoke to me of their frustration that we had thrown away the victory won by those brave men through surrendered sovereignty and liberal betrayal. But D-day’s lessons are more nuanced. We British have achieved our greatest victories, against Philip of Spain, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler, when we have been in lockstep with coalition partners. Each of these alliances was only barely tolerable, infuriating, inefficient, expensive and unpopular, yet ultimately ensured that we won. The most disastrous war of the last three centuries was the American Revolution, when, unusually, we found ourselves fighting all on our lonesome.