First of all, the cliches - an indispensable part of any commentary on football. The English thugs who rioted in Charleroi last Saturday cruelly damaged the reputation of more than what is sometimes called the "beautiful game". England, as a whole, has been diminished in the eyes of the world. The sceptred isle has become the home of hooligans - a country which breeds drunken louts the government is unable or unwilling to control.
The guilt should be widely spread and I am willing to accept my share. When I heard that the team - so recently victorious over Germany - might be ejected from Euro 2000, my immediate reaction was outrage and disbelief. Like David Davies, the executive director of the Football Association, I regarded disqualification as "too awful to contemplate". A more rational reaction would have been agreement that losing a place in the quarter-finals was far less important than taking a stand against violence.
No doubt the claims in mitigation are justified. Some innocent, genuine fans were penalised by the Belgian police. Many of the thugs were no more interested in the football than in Zen Buddhism. None of that changes the basic facts of either the disgrace or the inadequate way in which Britain has responded to it. A hysterical media seem incapable of facing the awful truth that the disease is now endemic.
On the radio last Sunday night, Lord Bassam, the junior home office minister, was asked why he had ruled out emergency legislation to prevent Saturday's mayhem recurring today. Parliament is probably in a mood to pass a Bill in a single parliamentary sitting, but it seems unlikely that the SAS could have been deployed sufficiently swiftly to snatch the miscreants off the streets before last Saturday's kick-off. What is needed is a change in culture at least as much as a change in the law.
The disease is so widespread that it is impossible to identify the potential troublemakers. If they were all real football supporters - hooligans who watch league matches and then enjoy a little violence on the side - they would be much easier to catch, convict and prevent from travelling abroad. But half the thugs whose pictures appeared in the weekend papers could not quote the offside rule to save their lives.
Football provides the opportunity for warp-minded chauvinists to demonstrate their brutal contempt for foreigners - a contempt which is often encouraged by politicians and journalists. The defining picture of the weekend tragedy was a bare-chested youth, cigarette in hand, giving the Nazi salute. His tattoo, proclaiming his affection for the mother country, spelt the revered name "Great Britian". Most football thugs are the sort of men who, regretting that we no longer rule the world, want us to control the penalty area - and fight the opposition on the terraces as we were once ready to fight them on the beaches.
That pathetic tendency has been grossly encouraged by the tabloid treatment of international football - typified by Saturday morning's "witty" headline which described the German team as "krap".
Yesterday's Daily Mirror included a massively indignant editorial which demanded a "crackdown on the mindless thugs". Its lofty tone was in profound contrast to a column written for that day's paper by Tony Parsons: "Yes, do mention the war . . . they had it coming." Mr Parsons reminded his readers of "boys in their teens who died at Anzio". He called the Germans "Huns".
The Mirror editor is explicit that at half-past seven he decided, in light of the news, that the column was "inappropriate". But it appears on the Daily Mirror website. And it raises a question to which we have yet to hear the answer. If UEFA had not threatened to expel England from the tournament and the story of "jagged black shrapnel" had been regarded as "appropriate", how much responsibility would the Mirror have taken for the next night's riots?
The tabloids are not the only culprits. Football managers who condone fouls on the field and violence off it, television pundits who excuse any sort of behaviour if the guilty player is talented and columnists who write of football as a matter of life and death (when at best it is a game and at worst part of the entertainment industry) must share the blame. Even the benign publicity for Euro 2000 has been damaging. "Thirty years of hurt?" The emotional exaggeration is ridiculous. Unfortunately, it is also another provocation to the catastrophe of Charleroi.
Roy Hattersley is a former deputy leader of the British Labour Party