SPECTATOR SPORT
With fans like these MPs...
Simon Barnes
MARGARET THATCHER had the right idea about football. She tried to ban it, and came quite close to succeeding. Her dream was to establish a nationwide identity-card scheme, under which no one could go to a football match without a special passport that said it was All Right.
She inspired sympathy for football in every right-thinking person, it being a rule of life that nothing inspires sympathy for a cause so much as a wild and incontinent anti. Thatcher tried to ban football; New Labour is trying to many it. Thus any decent person with a reasonable set of prejudices is filled at once with the deepest dislike of both football and footballing politicians.
The latest excitement — following such things as the commissioning of a national stadium suitable only for football, and the Prime Minister's personal recommendation that the England coach should be dismissed — is the gang of four Sheffield MPs who suggested that Danny Wilson, the manager of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, should be sacked.
An irony that has escaped few people is that David Blunkett, the employment min- ister, is a member of the gang. However, the loudest is Joe Ashton, a former vice- president of Sheffield Wednesday. It is more complicated than simple rent-a-quote stuff: the MPs were involved in a meeting about the many problems of a turbulent and financially troubled club.
But it was the 'Sack Wilson' business that caught the attention, provoking a backlash that even reached the players, who promptly managed a 2-0 win over Bradford City. We have learnt in a hard school the impossibility of keeping politics out of sport; it is touching to find that so many are prepared• to fight a Canute-like battle to keep out politicians.
The current crop of footballing politicians are like parents who watch Top of the Pops with their children, listening to gangsta rap with smiling faces and tapping feet. 'This is jolly good, isn't it? I think I'll buy the album.' Parental liking, of course, takes all the child- ish pleasure away from the music. A parent's role is to say things like, 'Why can't they have a real tune like they did in my day?'
Football has turned every MP into Fred Scuttle, the Benny Hill character who was always sidling into shot with an eager grin on his face. Westminster must be entirely populated by people wearing team scarves and whirring their football rattles along the corridors of power. No doubt every selec- tion committee instructs prospective parlia- mentary candidates to 'find a football team you have supported since you were a boy before the season is quite over'.
The effect on the electorate, however, is counterproductive. Ashton insists he has a right to speak about football and Sheffield Wednesday; most people would say he has no right whatsoever — on purely aesthetic grounds. He spoils the picture; he is an incongruous element in the composition. We turn to the back pages for pleasure. Here, let off the business of thinking too much, we are able to enjoy unending stories from the fabulous domain of sport. The last thing we want is an MP calling attention to himself and telling us how much fun we are all having. MPs in football are like Bob Dylan's Mr Jones: 'You try so hard, but you just don't understand, do you, Mr Jones?'
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