Terry Venables and the summer of 1996

The first Chelsea game I can remember is the 1967 FA Cup Final, when we lost 2-1 to Spurs. Terry Venables, a former Chelsea favourite, was playing for our opponents.

Legend has it that he was in the habit of stopping the Chelsea team in the tunnel after the manager Tommy Docherty's team talk and countermand it with one of his own. Docherty tired of this, sold him and bought Charlie Cooke to be our playmaker instead.

But then his mother had told the Chelsea official who came to her house with a contract for the young Venables to sign that her boy would make a better manager than player, because he never stopped talking about the game.

Terry Venables' death has made me remember the summer of 1996. England's 4-1 group victory in the European team championship, which we hosted, is just about the finest performance by an England team that I have seen. Every time we attacked we looked like scoring.

England felt European that June. There were visiting supporters from 15 other countries (including Scotland), the sun shone and even we played sexy football.

Venables' charm was part of the attractive England package, and since he was forced out of the England job over his financial affairs - a Labour MP called Kate Hoey was among his most persistent critics - being an England fan has rarely felt as good

It's more evidence that as far as Britain was cool in the 1990s, it was cool under John Major rather than Tony Blair. Oh yes.

John O'Farrell voted for Kate Hoey

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For years after he published Things Can Only Get Better in 1998, John O'Farrell was everywhere.

Though he was funny, I found him annoying. That was because, while trading as a satirist of all parties and all politicians, he was in reality a Labour loyalist.

He fought Maidenhead (and Theresa May) for Labour at the 2001 general election and popped up again as their candidate in the 2013 Eastleigh by-election.

It was not so much that O'Farrell ignored Labour as a humourist, it was that he used humour to deflect criticism rather than expose the party.

Time has moved on, and he has now published Things Can Only Get Worse.

Chris Mullin reviewed it for the Guardian today and quoted a passage that shows this deflection tactic is still in full working order:

In the 2017 election campaign O’Farrell, an ardent pro-remainer, had another little dilemma to grapple with. He had the bad luck to be living in the constituency of Kate Hoey, one of only a handful of Labour MPs who were Brexiters. Through his letter box each week came Lib-Dem leaflets depicting Hoey cosying up to Nigel Farage. 

What to do? Does he follow the example of his wife and tear up his Labour party card or does he soldier on? In the end, he sticks with Labour. 

“I am married to the Labour party for better or worse, in sickness and health, in Kinnock and in Blair. And sometimes they drive me mad, and I feel embarrassed and ashamed, but much more often I feel proud.” As for Hoey, “she’s that auntie in Kettering who got crossed off the Christmas card list; she’s my nutty cousin who got drunk at the wedding and took a swing at the vicar, but she is still related (twice removed, maybe)”.

Hoey is league with forces that seek to roll back Labour's every achievement. And even if you think that too dramatic, the economic slump that Brexit is likely to cause will make it impossible for any incoming Labour government to do what it desires.

But O'Farrell makes a joke, we laugh and he moves on.

It's not that I think O'Farrell should have torn up his own Labour membership care, it's just that I think he should not have voted for Kate Hoey.

Six of the Best 697

Fintan O'Toole dissects the fantasy that is Brexit: "Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter. She didn’t support it in last year’s referendum and there is no reason to think that, in private, she has ever changed her mind. But she saw that the path to power led toward the cliff edge, from which Britain will take its leap into an unknown future entirely outside the European Union. Her strategy was one of appeasement—of the nationalist zealots in her own party, of the voters who had backed the hard-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), and of the hysterically jingoistic Tory press, especially The Daily Mail."

The Liberal Democrats finished far behind Kate Hoey and Labour in Vauxhall. Our candidate George Turner offers his reflections on the campaign there.

"Since the Great Recession, Polanyi has become something else: a totem for social democracy, much like Marx for communism or Hayek for neoliberalism." Daniel Luban on the elusive Karl Polanyi.

"The Berlin Wall had stood for decades as the most tangible symbol of the intransigence of Cold War politics. Then, quite suddenly it was gone, but not through any of the battle scenarios the generals had war-gamed. On the day, it happened because some border guards refused to use lethal force." Rod Duncan on political change and fantastical fiction.

Tabish Khan has been to see Grayson Petty's new exhibition.

"On this morning of great doubt and uncertainty, I think we should consider things of far greater interest like the lookers' huts on Romney Marsh in Kent," says Peter Ashley,

More on Kate Hoey's Trotskyist past

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When I wrote about this in June of last year, someone left a comment directing me to The Cedar Lounge Revolution, an Irish political blog.

There a commenter, NollaigO, left the following in 2008:

Living in London in the early 1970s she became a vice-president of the NUS.[Jack Straw was NUS president at the time]. Returning from an overseas conference, she found herself sitting next to Tariq Ali on the plane. Tariq persuaded her to join the IMG, which she did in summer 1971. 

In subsequent years she used to muddy this connection by claiming that she was in the Spartacus League, a short lived youth wing of the IMG. She was never at ease with the Irish Republican Trotskyism of the IMG and was also very inimical to Gery Lawless an IMG member at the time. 

She felt that having Lawless as a member discredited the IMG. Under the influence of Brian Trench [political influence of course!] she joined the IS in 1972 but her stay there was also limited. 

She joined Hackney Labour party and supported the Troops Out Movement for a period before becoming a supporter of the BICO front organisation, Campaign for Labour Representation in Northern Ireland. 

Nowadays the IPR group are quiet hostile to her,dubbing her TallyHoey in a recent article!

You need a degree in far-left factions to understand all that, but NollaigO does drop in a fascinating point that should interest us all.

He says that Kate Hoey is the niece of the late BBC political correspondent John Cole. If true, this would certainly qualify as a Trivial Fact of the Day.

I can't find a definitive source that confirms it, but the same story is told by Malcolm Redfellow and he generally know what he is talking about.

When Kate Hoey was a Trotskyist

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This seems a good day to explore Kate Hoey's long-lost Trotskyist past.

Brian Deer wrote in 1993:

Although she admits the details only under protest, before she joined the Labour Party in 1972, she had been a member of a Trotskyite outfit called the Spartacus League - at the time perhaps the most loony of British extremists. 

The league followed the Russian revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in expecting a spontaneous workers revolt, and was so notoriously penetrated by MI5, people joked that if security service agents raised their hands en bloc they could win every vote at meetings.