Unless they’re on Branson’s space rocket, there’s no good reason for Wills and Rishi not to fly out to cheer on the Lionesses

Virgin Galactic took its first passengers into space this week. The company isn’t British any more, but its boss, Richard Branson, is.

It almost feels as though the timing was deliberate. Rishi Sunak says he hasn’t got time to fly to Australia to watch the Lionesses take on Spain on Sunday. The Prince of Wales, who is also the president of the (English) Football Association, says he’s not going to – for reasons on which he has not expanded.

Branson has been boasting for a while that in a few years’ time, you’ll be able to fly on his rocket ship from London to Australia in two hours. So, put your money where your mouth is, Dicky, and get Wills and Rishi out there.

The PR potential for all concerned seems almost unimaginable. Just the thought of the pictures... the prime minister and the future king, striding out to the spacecraft, not to go where no man has gone before, but to go precisely where England’s brave women have gone already – to Australia, and on, perchance, to glory.

All right, so there are some logistical problems to consider, namely that said spacecraft currently takes off from New Mexico, by which point the prime minister and His Royal Highness would already be halfway there. Nor is there, as far as I’m aware, any viable way of landing the thing in Australia, but they do have a lot of desert to aim for.

There is also the unignorable fact that the technology is not necessarily entirely safe at this point, though the prime minister could certainly consider whether it would really be worse to burn up on re-entry somewhere high above Woolloomooloo than to go through what the voters have lined up for him next year.

But the potentially spine-tingling nature of this kind of PR triumph does intimate that the failure of the two to attend at all is at least a little bit of a PR disaster.

Though it is wearisome to find oneself always, at these rarefied moments in women’s football, comparing the players to their male counterparts, certain truths are nonetheless self-evident. The pictures of Emmanuel Macron knee-sliding across the Fifa VIP area in Moscow in 2018 are nothing less than iconic. They are also, as it happens, visionary, in the sense that Monsieur Macron had the vision to slide very far away from both Vladimir Putin and his best pal, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, who mercifully are not stinking the photograph out for all eternity.

Not even a year ago, Macron was on the pitch in Qatar, placing a consoling arm around his fallen heroes – and to his credit, it was only most, not all, who clearly wanted him to go away.

The King of Spain made it to Wimbledon’s royal box just weeks ago, to witness the crowning of the new king of tennis, Carlos Alcaraz. Spain are England’s opponents on Sunday. The King’s wife, Queen Letizia, is Sydney-bound for the weekend.

Presumably, there are PR pluses and minuses that both men are weighing up. Environmentalists will point out that it is a long way to fly for a 90-minute football match, but it is hardly more of a waste of time (and certainly of money) than Liz Truss’s £500,000 journey by private jet in 2018, which served no discernible purpose beyond allowing her to have her photograph taken next to the Sydney Harbour bridge.

They may also wish to consider whether they are taking a lose-lose gamble. The England men’s football team are quite good at the moment. Their making it to a World Cup final can certainly not be ruled out. And should that happen, it seems highly unlikely that either the prince or the prime minister will be absent from the occasion. It is an absolute certainty that the fact of their presence at that, but not at the women’s event, would do them a lot more harm than good.

Sunak, you would have to think, knows this, so we must conclude that he is betting that either a) England won’t win next summer’s European Championships or b) somebody else will be prime minister by then. Or indeed both. Either is worth a punt, so why not the accumulator?

It may also be that there’s not much in it for Rishi. At the Euro 2020 final, at Wembley of all places, the broadcast feed provided by Uefa did not cut to Boris Johnson even once, not for a single second, correctly confirming his status as a significantly less important VIP than – to take but one random example – Turkish Instagram-based restaurateur Salt Bae.

But in any event: Rishi, come on, it’s not too late. There’s an election next year, and we can be absolutely certain that the prime minister will talk at great length on all issues pertaining to women and equality, and will emphasise his credentials as “a father of daughters”. He always does.

It would be a shame to provide his critics with such an easy bit of ammunition: “Why didn’t you take them to watch the Lionesses in a World Cup final?”

Please, just get on Skyscanner. It is quite possibly the only first-class ticket we won’t begrudge you.