The New Statesman's questionable football chant claim

“You can probably determine the emotional-political register of Britain through the songs that are sung at sporting events,” writes Clive Martin in this week’s New Statesman. “And right now, ‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker’ has become so omnipresent, so all-inviting, that even highly tribalised football fans have put aside their rivalries to sing it.

“Sky and ITV partially mute the ditty from their live sports broadcasts, trying to avoid transmitting political statements, but at this point, it’s barely a political statement at all. It is more like a display of mass casual bullying, a playground chant carried out on a national level.”

Which it would be… were it true. Rats in a Sack watches an awful lot of domestic football, both in person and on TV and has never heard fans chant about the prime minister. One contact says he’s heard the “omnipresent” song only once in 40 matches attended this season, and that was by Millwall fan. Certainly it could be heard being sung by England supporters during the snoozefest World Cup qualifier against Andorra late last year, but that hardly makes it ubiquitous.

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Rats in a Sack

A Sky Sports source tells Rats how it’s not an issue they have ever heard of and points out that muting individual chants, even “partially”, would be all but technically impossible in a live broadcast (hence commentators often apologising “if our mics picked up any choice language”, “choice language” being a phrase used by football commentators and absolutely no-one else).

‘Keir Starmer’s a wanker’ has definitely been chanted at a sports event recently – it was heard at this year’s PDC World Darts Championship at London’s Alexandra Palace, to the extent that at one point during his quarter final against Gary Anderson, the then world number 20 Ryan ‘Heavy Metal’ Searle appeared to join in.

But that wasn’t football. Was Martin mixing up his tackles with his tungsten?