Expat dilettante’s empty pitch

Our rugby side needs all the help it can get, so Wallaby fans might see a silver lining in the dust-up over Swing Low, Sweet Chariot — if only it puts the Poms off their game. England’s unofficial rugby anthem, a biblical song written by a freed slave in the US in about 1865, has often seemed a bit quirky and eccentric. Especially when it stirs up our opponents on the field.

English fans, who roar it out with ardour at critical points in Tests, with no racism intended or implied in its words, are irritated by Prince Harry’s virtue signalling. Nobody needs an idle royal, who abandoned his country for a private life in California, telling them what not to sing. As patron of the Rugby Football Union, Harry Markle (as one Wallaby fan dubbed him) is out of step with most of those who pack the stands. The RFU wants fans “to make informed decisions’’. It could start by explaining why Nazi Germany’s Reich Music Examination Office listed the song as “undesired and harmful”. Censorship is the way to make Western culture less civilised, not more. The row is almost enough to stop Wallaby fans groaning as Poms strike up the chorus.