Obviously, I know that politics and football are different. One is a high-stakes endeavour that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people, with an impact felt around the globe and down the generations – and the other is politics. I know too that there will be plenty of readers who will be like I was until nearly a couple of decades ago: cheerfully indifferent to the beautiful game, even after a week like this one, when the top prize in English football was won. But stick with me, because there are lessons to be learned from what just happened – lessons for politics, for the prime minister and for all of us.

I am referring, of course, to Arsenal winning the Premier League, ending a 22-year long wait that it sometimes seemed would never end. I claim no objectivity here. I became a fan just a few years into that drought, brought into the Arsenal fraternity by my young sons. So there I was, in the crowd that instantly converged on the Emirates Stadium late on Tuesday night, Arsenal shirt and scarf on, singing loudly and beaming at strangers.

Keep politics out of sport, they used to say. But there are things politics could learn from sport – and specifically, from Arsenal’s long-awaited success. And before you dismiss as fanciful the very idea of politicians taking advice from the dugout, recall that it does happen: former Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson confirmed that Tony Blair once sought his guidance on how to manage a star player who refused to obey instructions. (The source of Blair’s trouble was the man in the No 11 shirt, Gordon Brown.)

Start with stability. Mikel Arteta took over in December 2019, a week after Boris Johnson won a landslide election. While Arteta has remained in his post, there have been four prime ministers, with a fifth presumed to be on the way. Downing Street has become like Chelsea, changing bosses with every bad run of form. But the Arsenal way is........

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