The UK’s World Cup diplomatic mullet

This post was originally published on Politico.

While Boston and Dallas have been taken over by marauding Scotland and England fans, Washington, D.C., this week welcomed a (slightly) more sedate British crowd at Duke’s Grocery, a trendy restaurant and bar in Washington’s West End neighborhood.

Call it the U.K.’s diplomatic mullet: Business in the front; party in the back.

More than a hundred England fans crowded some 10 television sets inside the bar on Wednesday, invited by the U.K. embassy to mark their team’s first game of the World Cup against Croatia.

Flags for every participant hung down from the ceiling. An old British telephone box sat