Representing Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, Engelbert Humperdinck elicited jocular journalistic comment for the biographical detail that he divides his time between Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Leicester. The valiant crooner has cause for smugness. Few can now fail to envy his association with a city that on Monday pulled off a sporting victory without parallel.
In winning the Premier League, the unfancied and unfashionable Leicester City overturned conventional footballing wisdom. Instead of being a contest of spending power, this season’s championship has been a triumph of tactical intelligence.
Claudio Ranieri, the manager, takes his place in a line of Leicester celebrities that includes Richard III, Showaddywaddy and the visionary conspiracy theorist David Icke. Indeed it’s fair to say that he is more generally admired than any of these and also more emblematic of Leicester’s qualities, for his modesty belies his achievements.
The city of which Ranieri will be for ever a favoured son is perhaps most famous for being where the M1 joins the M69. It deserves to be known and celebrated for more. Being both a Roman city, with impressive remains, and a symbol of Victorian industrial expansion, it encapsulates this country’s history of enterprise and construction. Its more recent history is also proud.
Leicester is an international city. Of its 330,000 residents, a third were born outside Britain, by far the largest number being from India. Only for a brief time in the 1970s was there any significant support for racist political movements in the city. Leicester is not only a successful model of integration and social cohesion but an essential one. Without the entrepreneurship of immigrant communities, it would be a declining post-industrial city. It deserves to be as famed for its civic achievements as for its improbable sporting glory.