The police have made a mistake. Keir Starmer is right to get off the sidelines and wade in Philip Collins

The ban on fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv has become a political football, with the West Midlands force and the PM on opposing teams

- Andrew Rawnsley is away

A dispute involving football and the application of the law sounds as if it were designed to bring the best out of the prime minister.

These are his private and his public passions. But the question of whether or not the supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv should be permitted to travel to Birmingham to watch their club's game against Aston Villa on 6 November also shows that the prime minister, struggling to stay calm and reasonable, might never escape the verdict that he is a man out of time.

The decision not to allow visitors from Tel Aviv was made by the West Midlands police on the grounds of the putative threat to public safety. The police took advice from the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group (SAG), on which body sit representatives of Birmingham city council, the British Transport Police and the various emergency services of the West Midlands. Earlier this month, the SAG advised the organisers of the Diwali Mela festival in Handsworth to cancel, following the Manchester synagogue attack. Last week they declined to issue the relevant safety certificates to Aston Villa.

At which point, all tranquil reason disappeared. No sooner had the news broken than every self-appointed performative controversialist had waded in to point out how Aston Villa v Maccabi Tel Aviv proved they had been right about everything, all along. Ayoub Khan, the independent local MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, was delighted that the police had, in his unlikely view, taken notice of the petition he had organised to prevent travel from Tel Aviv. Zarah Sultana took time off from disorganising a new political party to demand that Uefa ban all Israeli teams from competing in its competitions, a view echoed by Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Green party.