Johnson is outplayed again by a 23-year-old

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen a series of clashes in the UK between Boris Johnson and a bighearted 23-year-old soccer star called Marcus Rashford who campaigns to end child poverty. There’s only ever one winner in a sporting contest — and it’s not the prime minister, even with an 80-strong Conservative majority in the House of Commons.
Johnson has joked that Rashford is a more effective opposition leader than Labour’s Keir Starmer. He should ask himself why. Rashford’s skills with a ball may earn him millions as a goal scorer for Manchester United and England but the local boy has stayed close to his roots in the poorer parts of the northern city where his club is based. Although his single mother worked hard in a series of low-wage jobs to provide for her family, it was free school meals and food banks that kept the wolf from the door. Soccer players are often caricatured in Britain’s tabloid newspapers as selfish, overpaid narcissists. Sometimes they deserve the flak. But Rashford is an admirable example of upward social mobility with a social conscience. Conservatives should celebrate him as a beacon for aspirational values.
When the English football season was put into lockdown last year, Rashford assembled a team to advise him on homelessness and child hunger. That puts him one step ahead of a government that has hardly been ungenerous to disadvantaged Britons during the epidemic — tens of billions of pounds have been spent to maintain living standards — but has failed to frame the debate on welfare and child poverty. If the Tories won’t, then Rashford and others will do it for them. Johnson’s party will be left with its old reputation for heartlessness, hardly ideal for a prime minister elected on a promise to “level up” working class communities.
Last June, Rashford successfully roused voters, the media and members of Parliament to persuade the government to change its mind on ending a free school meal scheme for poor children during the summer holidays. Ministers huffed and puffed, while the Treasury pronounced that the bounty was unaffordable. Then Johnson gave in. The footballer intervened again in the autumn, when he asked for another extension of free meals. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak threatened that taxes would have to go up to pay for it. But the prime minister folded once more when it became clear that popular opinion was with Rashford.
The sums involved in putting food on the table for poor children are negligible in comparison to the billions spent (and too often wasted) elsewhere. Rashford only asked for an extra 40 million pounds ($55 million) and got
considerably more. Taxpayers approve. The political costs to the government of repeatedly appearing to lack compassion for the vulnerable, however, are incalculable.
—Bloomberg