Zahawi A Liverpool Hooligan? What A Steaming Pile Of Tory Horse****
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer said he was part of a 'Firm' that went looking for trouble at matches in the 1980s. As we used to say back then: "Are you taking the piss because I'm on the dole?"
POLITICAL FOOTBALL SECURED an exclusive interview with a member of the Liverpool ‘firm’ who attended away games with Nadhim Zahawi, who claimed last week that he “would go out looking for fights as a football hooligan” in the 1980s. The former Conservative MP spent two months as Chancellor of the Exchequer two years ago, briefly taking the second most important role in British politics.
The man, who we will call Joe Wagg to protect his identity, had some interesting things to say about the Tory bigwig.
Political Football What was he like?
Joe Wagg He was a strange one. He was Billy-no-mates and latched on to us for London games. Or was it game? He wasn’t around long. He kept telling us he could have been in the Iraqi army. We said we’d been in the Barmy Anny Road Army. You could tell he had no idea what we were on about.
PF Was he a hooligan?
JW He wanted to be. All we wanted was to have a bevvy. Chance – that was what we called him – volunteered to hold the ale kitty money. Then something strange happened: the bastard wouldn’t let us have it back. He said we had to be fiscally prudent. A couple of the lads were on the dole and he said they shouldn’t be spending it on ciggies and beer. Think of the taxpayers.
Then he went on about how our kids wouldn’t be able to afford the match if we carried on flashing the cash the way we did. I suppose he was right, just not in the way he meant.
Oh, and he didn’t put into the kitty and was drinking on our quid until we realised and pulled him on it.
PF Anything else that struck you as weird.
JW Yeah, a crew of grafters came in and were talking about raiding the jewellery shops on the Edgware Road. He got really animated and told them they shouldn’t rob from the rich – the busies would be all over them and they’d get nicked. “Steal from the poor,” he said. “No one gives a **** what you do to them.” We were, like, “Aye, aye, la! Behave.”
PF Was there any knuckle? And did he get stuck in?
JW It was semi-final day and he wanted to tax some Southampton boys [steal their designer clothing]. He’d read the tabloids about all that crap. We laughed and told him they were all meffs. We had far better clobber.
But it kicked off on the High Road and the strangest thing of all happened. He started hugging a busie horse. He loved that horse. Said something about keeping it warm. We thought he was hiding behind it but decades later we realised how much he loved the nags. Anyway, we lost him in the melee.
PF Did you ever see him again?
JW At Chelsea the next month. We told him to watch out for Headhunters. He said he had his CV out with a few firms. Never worked out what he meant by that. We last saw him on the Fulham Road, bouncing backwards towards the Tube station shouting “Get Them!”
We’d been locked in for an hour and the police had cleared the Chelsea back well away from us. He wanted to see us at Wembley the following week. We said we’d meet him at Baker Street and went drinking in Soho instead.
PF And you called him ‘Chance.’ Was it because of him holding the kitty? Was it a short version of ‘Chancellor’?
JW Christ, no. It was because he was a blagging chancer no one trusted. We were right, like, weren’t we?
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Of course, none of the above is true. Or not much of it. But there are some points that need to be made.
First of all, Liverpool did not have a ‘firm’ in the manner most people understand. West Ham’s ICF were a firm. The Leeds Service Crew were a firm. Leicester’s Baby Squad were a firm.
We had none of that nonsense in Liverpool. We laughed at it.
There were more generic terms used. If you took the normal, timetabled trains as opposed to the football specials, you rode the ‘Ordinary’ and were referred to as ‘Ordinary Boys.’ But it was a loose grouping and no one considered themselves a ‘member’ of anything.
There were also local crews of friends who were recognisable little mobs. The Huyton Baddies were the most well known and the Holt – named after the pub where they drank – were another example. But the only overarching identity common to all of us was as Liverpool boys (I’m talking about the youthful, Scally type fans: of course there were also more staid supporters who wanted nothing to do with us and our subculture).
Our away mob that drank in the Yankee and took the Ordinaries was comprised of three components, which often overlapped. The biggest group by far were the drinkers. What we wanted was to have a beer, a laugh and go the match. If home fans tried to pick on us drinkers, we were not shy. But, in general, we couldn’t be arsed chasing around the streets playing hard men.
The next biggest grouping were the robbers. Anarchy could sometimes provide useful cover for them but most of the time it brought unwelcome police attention. They liked to get their booty and move on.
Fighters made up the smallest subset. You knew most of them and they ranged from risible to reckless. They were best given a swerve.
Given Zahawi’s ethnicity, he would have stood out like a sore thumb among Liverpool’s mob in 1986. None of my matchgoing mates remember him. Neither do I.
What I do recall, vividly, is the day he references when “a giant police horse smashed me into a shop front on the Seven Sisters Road…”
Some context. It was FA Cup semi-final day, played at White Hart Lane. None of us expected trouble. We had no axe to grind with Southampton.
What we had forgotten is that Everton played them in the last four of the cup at Highbury two years earlier. Our Evertonian friends and neighbours gave the Southampton boys a proper pasting.
They were not going to let Scousers do that to them again. Not that we wanted to fight with them – it was the season that followed Heysel, after all, so we had no appetite for violence.
We were walking up the High Road (often, those who don’t know what they are talking about mistake the Seven Sisters Road for the High Road) when a substantial crew of Southampton came down a side street. To cut a long story short, about 20 of them kicked me all over the road. When I scrambled to my feet, they pinned me against the wall punching at will (one of them was shouting “Stanley him!” which was not a good moment). Finally, they tried to throw me through a plate glass shopfront.
A policeman arrived just in time to stop me going through the window and promptly tried to hurl me into a Black Mariah. Another copper informed his mate that the only crime I committed was to be a punch bag and they let me go.
Their sergeant responded to that by kicking me hard up the backside with his steel-toecapped boots. Only he missed slightly and hit me on the coccyx. It was months before I could sit down comfortably.
Bumped by a horse? That would have been a proper result for me – and two of our group who ended up in the cells.
As alluded to earlier, Zahawi does not have a good track record when talking about horses. He neglected to mention on nearly six grand’s worth of electricity claims on MP’s expenses that this included heating and lighting stables on his estate. He was allowed to be recompensed for energy used in his second home but it’s a massive neigh to getting the taxpayer to fund the horsey house.
My verdict? He was caught up in a bit of chaos on the way to White Hart Lane and has turned this incident into a hooligan tough-guy origin story. For what it’s worth, it was the worst beating I took in 15 years of going to away games.
Zahawi’s story strikes me as containing as much fantasy as his expenses sheet.
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So who was in your crew, Nad, la? The Rees-Mogg family? Thérèse Coffey?Michael Howard? Nadine Dorries? To be fair, that lot could cause proper havoc anywhere they went. The Tory bastards.
Just look what they’ve done to the bloody country.
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If you interested in the reality of going to the match in the 1970s and 80s, Read Far Foreign Land. Available here £10 UK, £15 Europe, £18 Rest Of World. All including postage