Thanks to David Davis and Boris Johnson, England are now one of those World Cup sides that can be described sympathetically as “playing on despite the political turmoil back home”. As the old saying goes: dance like no one’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt and play a World Cup like your shitshow of a government is about to collapse itself and plunge your country further into the mire.

And you know what? Depending on how much barely charted territory you can handle – England are in the semi-finals of the actual World Cup, after all – it feels great to be that side. Those guys typically pick up a lot of secondary support from people whose own national teams have already gone out. In the bars of Rio, I hope people are beginning to say: “I’m rooting for England now – it’s so sad what their dreadful politicians have done to them. But, you know, in the middle of it all, they just want to play football. It’s a very pure, special thing. They really rise above it with their magical, spellbinding corners. They remind you why it’s called the beautifully planned game. Yup, come on England! WE’RE ALL ENGLISH NOW.” All that in Portuguese, obviously.

Furthermore, I trust England are now the subject of a welter of patronising articles across the foreign press, explaining how the hopes of a once-proud nation have been dashed by Etonian warlords/lying populists/corrupt bribers, and are now telescoped entirely on to this plucky squad. (Before we go much further, I must apologise to all the other home nations for this analogy – at the same time as offering the caveat that it is, after all, just an analogy. We’re at the business end of a World Cup with no football for 36 hours: be prepared to suck up a lot of tenuous analogies).

Anyway, how do these foreign editorials run? “All eyes are on rebel strongman Boris Johnson,” a leader in the Nigeria Tribune might put it, “once beloved in his tribal lands but whose reputation has oxidised as rapidly as one of the vanity projects to which he siphoned vast sums of public money.”

“As allegations of democratic corruption swirl,” a foreign correspondent for one of the Mexico City papers could have it, “the slum bars of this humbled nation throb with a pride against the odds. ‘It’s coming home’, runs the local chant, that can be heard from shanty to chic apartment in this otherwise divided country. What kind of home it could return to is, alas, another matter …” And so on for another four thousand words.

Throwing this particular cultural moment into even sharper relief is the UK’s longtime refusal to realise it had become one of the true basket cases of international life – something that can surely no longer be ignored. Yet even a couple of weeks ago it still felt like something that happened to other countries. “For many years,” the former Argentina forward Jorge Valdano reflected of his homeland in a wonderful article for the Guardian, “football made up for our long political, social and economic decline.”

Incredible, when you think about it, that England are close to that being the sort of thing that might be routinely said about them. England! Until literally four minutes before this World Cup, there was a corner of so many foreign fields that was forever a toxic England exit. Charleroi, Shizuoka, Lisbon, Gelsenkirchen, Bloemfontein, São Paolo. The fact we’d gone out of Euro 2016 to Iceland a mere four days after going out of Europe to Brexit was frequently characterised as somehow symbiotic by people such as me. People with deadlines, particularly. Everything was a metaphor for everything else. Indeed, two weeks ago Valdano had begun by ruing the fact you could now say the same about Argentina the football side as you could about Argentina the country: “So many things are wrong with Argentina we do not know what is wrong; so much is happening no one knows what is happening.”

Same. Except, no – wait! Hilariously and extraordinarily, the football is going OK. It’s going more than OK. It’s going so marvellously OK that whatever happens on Wednesday at the Luzhniki, Gareth Southgate’s England have done enough to be vastly attractive to all sorts of public figures who wish to co-opt their spiritual rebirth.

All of which necessitates a popular decree: following the shithousery of the past 24 hours, no Conservatives, at all, are now allowed to attempt to piggyback on the success (or indeed the plucky failure) of the England football side. They are formally banned from even mentioning it. Tories: you all need to realise that this latest self-own is of a wildly different order to Theresa May being tricked into holding up the Hazard Belgium shirt during her visit to Brussels the other week. Sorry to nick your catchphrase, but let US be clear: if you guys collapse the government in the week England could reach its first World Cup final since 1966 – having already diary-clashed Donald Trump’s visit into that same week – you will carry a mark of Cain that will make all of your other marks of Cain look like henna tattoos.

I mean, honestly. Shame on the politicians looking at this sweltering hot, heady summer of football and thinking: “Ooh, this would totally be enhanced by a general election”. Really? REALLY? Let us be very clear: stay away from Gareth and stay out of our fun.