As we enter electoral campaign injury time both the Reds and the Blues are still dreaming of a late winner before the full-time whistle blows on General Election 2019.
Labour has promised fan representation on the boards of football clubs. The Conservatives pledge money for the grassroots game. The Lib Dems have stood up for safe standing. While all these policies represent positive developments for Britain's national sport, the relationship between football and the country's politicians has often been more a case of 'losing the dressing room' than one of 'having a telepathic understanding'.
Current Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn't appear to even know which code he was playing during an England versus Germany charity-match at the Madejski stadium in 2006. Having come on as a sub, wearing the red England number 10 shirt, Johnson raced to close down former German international and Manchester City midfielder Maurizio Gaudino. Gaudino, on the halfway line, dropped his shoulder beautifully and prepared to move into space. He was soon left wishing he'd just gotten rid. Johnson speared Gaudino with a rugby tackle that left the German in a crumpled heap and in need of medical treatment. Johnson would claim afterwards that he hadn't played football since he was 18. Perhaps when the textbooks on Brexit are written, historians will come to see this tackle as the moment Bo-Jo first took aim at Europe.
Back in October 1995, Tony Blair played the beautiful game a bit more beautifully than Boris. Ahead of a thumping victory for New Labour in 1997, Blair was out to prove himself as the man to sweep away John Major's increasingly out-of-touch government. How better to state your common-man credentials than with a game of head tennis with Kevin Keegan? As MP for northeastern constituency Sedgefield, the link to Keegan - whose vibrant Newcastle United side that season were setting a ferocious pace at the top of the Premier League - was perfect. On the tarmac of a leisure centre, 'King Kev' and "Twinkle-toes Tony' stripped off their suit jackets and ties to delight the assembled media throng with a near 30-header rally. Behind Blair, spin doctor Alastair Campbell's expression can be seen visibly changing from severe trepidation that his man is about to be badly shown up, to growing delight as Big Tone shows he can mix it with the very best. Blair's face is a picture of concentration throughout. At one point he even rescues a terrible header from former European Footballer of the Year Keegan. It was public relations gold.
Blair would attempt to repeat the football trick. In a 1997 newspaper interview, he was quoted reminiscing, misty-eyed, of childhood memories sat in Newcastle's Gallowgate End watching 'Wor' Jackie Milburn smash in the goals. The slight problem was that at the time Milburn drew down the curtain on his stellar St James' Park career, young Tony was only four. Also back then the Gallowgate End didn't have seats. Once Blair became Prime Minister, critics would repeatedly point to this as indicative of his flexible relationship with the truth. In fairness though, the journalist who'd conducted the interview later admitted to misquoting Blair.
Another great apocryphal tabloid story from the 1990s was born from the exposure of the sordid affair between Tory MP David Mellor and actress Antonia de Sancha. Amid lurid headlines of extra-marital toe sucking, it was 'revealed' that Heritage Minister and Chelsea fan Mellor, insisted on wearing a replica Blues' home shirt to bed. De Sancha would later admit that this was a fiction invented by Max Clifford, then tsar of kiss and tell PR, to ensure top-dollar when selling her story. By then though the image of Mellor in his Chelsea strip had well and truly stuck, forever immortalised, puppet form, on TV's Spitting Image. Having scored this major own-goal for a government vainly trying to get morality "back to basics", Mellor was forced to resign from the Cabinet. He then lost his seat at the 1997 General Election. Football proved to be a kinder mistress to Mellor than De Sancha. He was later selected by the incoming Labour government to head up a new football task force and made the host of BBC Radio 5 Live's flagship football phone-in.
David Icke would make the opposite journey to Mellor, from a career in football to one in politics. As a promising young goalkeeper, Leicester born Icke was signed as an apprentice by Coventry City. He would go on to play in the Football League for Hereford United before his fledgeling career was cut short by injury. Icke then set about building a new life as a sports reporter. Working his way up from a local newspaper all the way to hosting BBC1's Final Score in the 1980s.
Icke, keenly interested in environmental issues, became increasingly political during the decade and was a high profile member of the emerging Green Party. Icke wrote several books addressing the environmental challenges facing the world and was elevated to a senior role within the Green Party as one of its principal speakers. Following a meeting with a Brighton based psychic, Icke came to believe he had been chosen for a mission: "to free the earth from a force that is working against the Godhead." For some reason, this role of saviour required him to exclusively wear turquoise shell suits, most famously when interviewed on Wogan, where Icke's theories were mercilessly mocked by the audience. In 1991 Icke would stand down from the Green Party but he remained a fixture in newspaper headlines. Icke developed a world view whereby earth has been infiltrated by interdimensional reptilian beings - Archons - who having hijacked the planet now prevent humanity from reaching its full potential. The proportion of Archons on FIFA's Executive Committee during the Sepp Blatter years remains unknown.
David Evans, like David Icke, had started out as a promising youth-player with a Midlands team. Rather than on the pitch, where he never made an appearance for Aston Villa, Evans made his mark in the boardroom and later the House of Commons. Evans became chairman of Luton Town in 1984 and followed QPR's example by replacing the grass at Kenilworth Road with astroturf. This was to the chagrin of those supporters who desired quality football over a 'which team can make the ball bounce higher than the main stand' competition. It was even less popular with the players for whom the match-day experience at Luton always involved severe carpet burns. The Hatters enjoyed their greatest ever triumph during Evans's stewardship, beating Arsenal with virtually the last kick of the game at Wembley to win the 1988 League Cup final 3-2.
It was however in the aftermath of Luton's infamous 1985 FA Cup quarter-final against Millwall that Evans grabbed the attention of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Third Division Millwall brought a huge contingent of supporters to Kenilworth Road and trouble soon followed. Seats were torn out from the stands, missiles, including a knife, lobbed onto the pitch before a pitch invasion prompted the referee to take the players off early in the first half. Following a call for calm over the public address system by Millwall manager George Graham the match resumed, allowing Luton to secure a one-nil victory. At full-time, the disturbances turned into a full-blown riot. Bruised and badly outnumbered the police were forced to beat a hasty retreat as fans stormed the pitch.
David Evans unilaterally declared the banning of away fans from Kenilworth Road. He also set about implementing a members-only policy for tickets at the ground that doubled up as a football I.D. card system. Those at the top of government enthusiastically adopted Evans ideas and called for this scheme to be rolled out indiscriminately across the game, regardless of whether individual clubs had no history of crowd trouble. Football for Thatcher was, as one newspaper column put it, "a slum sport for slum people." Evans was soon rewarded with the Conservative Party nomination in Welwyn and Hatfield, winning the seat at the 1987 election and holding it for a decade. The view that football fans were a menace to be treated not as human beings but as a threat to public order, took hold at the top of government in the late 1980s. This was to prove lethal for the 96 people who lost their lives at Hillsborough.
The untrue allegations that fan misbehaviour had caused the disaster, cast a long shadow. Politicians on both sides of the aisle consistently ignored the Hillsborough families tireless campaigning for justice. Finally though, in 2009 on an emotionally charged day at Anfield this changed. 20 years on from the disaster, Andy Burnham MP, Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, rose to address the memorial service commemorating the disaster's 20th anniversary. Having read the first few sentences of his speech, conveying sorrow but little more, Burnham is forced to stop. A chant of "Justice for the 96" swells inside the stadium. As a lifelong Evertonian, who followed his team to Cup semi-finals in the 1980s, Burnham knows only too well the deep scar left on the city of Liverpool by Hillsborough. Overcome with emotion, he slowly nods his head in tacit agreement with the crowd before concluding his speech. This chastening experience prompted Burnham, despite opposition from some colleagues, to ask permission for Hillsborough to be added to the next day's cabinet agenda. "To his eternal credit, Gordon Brown immediately backed me up and from that meeting came all the developments regarding the Hillsborough Independent Panel."
Finally, politicians had listened to and heard football on the issue that mattered most.