England show national characteristics are not black and white

Tears, hot tears, my eyes were brimming with tears on Saturday, as England went flying through the New Zealand defence. Out of a jumble of black shirts a streaking white one, English flyers jinking and jumping, twisting out of a tackle, suddenly finding a slant line across the field, outpacing their pursuers. Like a surfer emerging from the curl of a wave, this runner or that would burst out of an impossible situation and go for the great, green spaces. And occasionally they would succeed in doing the thing that can't be done against the All Blacks: score running tries.

But so they did. They ran, they passed, they caught the ball. Then they did something I'd never really seen before. They didn't drop it. Not once did they fall over a loose shoelace. Nobody lit up a cigarette in the scrum. And they held out in the last 20 minutes. They won the match! How times change.

Experts have been saying England have improved in rugby over the past 10 years; I'd never dared watch to find out.

The experience of watching England play rugby formed a whole world of national pessimism in my young mind. In the 1960s you watched England do well and you didn't dare hope. Those who hoped were disappointed. We weren't to win, we were to lose well. That's what we were good at.

What's changed in England to allow us to play like this? These things don't happen of themselves. A country's rugby style is deeply expressive of its character. Look at the French. Proud, unpredictable, petulant. The South Africans, fast, foul. The Irish. Owooo! This national character expressed on the rugby field has certainly been true of New Zealand. In its long years of conservatism and conformity the highest national virtue was strength. In rugby, you were judged by how far you could carry a man on your back. Loyalty was important, cohesion, packwork, silent suffering. Their talent for endurance is what allowed them to win every game in those last 20 minutes, by sheer, stupid, tree-carrying strength.

"Good forwards should be like pit-ponies," the playwright and All Black triallist Greg McGee wrote, "blind from lack of light". We weren't that much better in the northern hemisphere. A Welsh player once said: "At Pontypool, if we pass the ball from the fly-half to the inside centre, that's a move. We don't approve of moves in Pontypool."

Their economy was run like that as well in New Zealand, the most regulated outside eastern Europe. But the 1980s heralded a revolution. Suddenly New Zealand became the most deregulated economy in the world. Brute strength and loyalty were no longer enough. You had to adapt, you had to be flexible, you had to do a range of different things and to know what everyone else was doing. Suddenly the All Blacks emerged as the world's pre-eminent team; they were unbeatable. Fast, furious, full of explosive power, and yet chattering like hairdressers: "If you get tackled, roll to your right because I'll be coming behind you from the side."

But what's happened to us that's allowed us to do so well? An American CEO told me recently how much harder we work in London these days than they do in Manhattan. Is that it? A new seriousness? The end of the amateur ethic? More money for players? And if not that, then what?

Stayaway Portillo returns to haunt the House

Nine months ago, a Conservative voter wrote to his MP upbraiding him for not appearing in the Commons more often. The MP replied: "I choose not to contribute to parliamentary debate for now. I abstain in that way because I believe the best service I can render the party is to remove any pressure that I might be thought to bring against the party leader."

Michael Portillo MP (for it was he) realised that merely by appearing in the chamber he would cause speculation, unease, unrest, and be generally unhelpful to poor Mr Thing, the hoarse whisperer, who (at the time of writing) leads the Conservative Party.

But, you ask, was Mr Portillo's absence casual or ill-considered? Very far from it. "It is a decision based on 25 years of experience of politics," he told his constituent, "and a pretty clear understanding of the media's agenda".

How interesting. Something happened three or four weeks ago to Mr Portillo's support strategy. Suddenly the best service he could render his party leader changed from staying away and took the form of haunting the chamber morning, noon and night. His "pretty clear understanding of the media's agenda" may have been the decisive factor; as soon as he reappeared we all wondered what the hell he was up to. That is, we knew what he was up to, but wondered why he was being so obvious about it.

Mr Portillo is a talented sulker, and he cuts well. The hauteur is well-practised and no one can look through you quite as well as he. All these are valuable attributes, but it's a shame he can't do a bit of politics as well, while he's in a position to do so.

Shrunken heads that speak of greed

An item in the The Independent on Sunday told us about the struggle of indigenous peoples to repossess various artefacts. Maori tribes are demanding a cache of shrunken heads from the Marischal Museum in Aberdeen. They'll probably get them in the end, they're brilliant negotiators, it's one of their cultural talents.

In the early 19th century, the Irishman Frederick Maning went to live with a tribe in the Hokianga, a blissful part of New Zealand. He wanted some unoccupied land to build a house, but as soon as he declared himself as a buyer a large number of sellers materialised. Some of the titles to the land were curious. One said he'd owned the land because his grandfather had been killed on it; another claimed it because his grandfather had done the killing. One said he owned it because his family had always had the right to catch rats there – and to prove it: no rats. The last claim came from a man whose family had always lived there, and the original ancestor – a giant lizard as it turned out – was still in possession of it. Maning ended up paying everybody.

As for heads, traders would come offering money for shrunken heads to sell to Scottish museums, and local Maoris would cheerfully oblige, either by raiding a rival tribe and killing whom they could, or beheading the nearest slave, whose head was worth far more filled with hot sand. The parts that weren't sold made dinner; people are delicious and nutritious, by all accounts, and don't stick in your teeth.

The idea that these heads have any spiritual significance is a modern fabrication. That they represent murder, cannibalism, greed, sloth and primitive employment contracts between master and servant is something you'd think the tribes would rather put behind them.