The following passage is taken from an article in the Financial Times, titled "Shinzo Abe will not revive Japan by rewriting history."
When the Japanese prime minister tips up at the next month's meeting of the Group of Eight advanced industrial nations, it is a fair bet his fellow summiteers will want to get to know him.
Emphasis mine. What does the phrase I have put in italics mean? Does it have anything to do with football?
Best Answer
Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1984) offers two definitions of "tip up," but neither seems at all relevant to the quoted situation:
As Barmar says in a comment above, the context of the phrase "tips up" in the OP's question indicates that its intended meaning is "shows up." However, if this usage is idiomatic in the UK or elsewhere, it hasn't yet become widespread in published print writing. Google Books searches for the phrases "tip up at," "tips up at," "tipped up at," and "tipping up at" uncover exactly two on-point matches. From Fiona Parashar, The Balancing Act (2005):
And from Miranda Glover, Soulmates (2007):
I ran a second set of searches for "tip/tips/tipped/tipping up in" and found two additional matches. From Robert Ashton, Waking Up in London (2003) [snippet]:
And from Gabrielle Mander, Just Write: The Virgin Guide to Telling Your Story (2007):
Notwithstanding the Americanized spelling "energized" in Glover's excerpt, Soulmates was "First published in Great Britain," according to the book's copyright page; the other three books appear to have been published only in the UK. So it seems that "tips up" is a British idiom of fairly recent vintage (all four Google Books matches are from 2003 or later) that can be used with at or in (and possibly other prepositions) and has the meaning "shows up" or "pops up."