It was the announcement that a date has been set for Helen Mirren to take tea with the Queen which caused my anxiety levels to rise. Will Tony Blair soon be claiming to have seen Mousey? If he does, I’ll smell a rat.

Me, I once saw Mousey Brady run through Jackie Milburn’s legs with the ball. You wouldn’t want a footballing memory like that stolen by a gouger like Blair.
The possibility of Blair robbing my memory of Mousey first stirred when Blair – or, rather, his Official Spokesman, whom journalists are not allowed to name – made a grab for the glory of Ms. Mirren’s Oscar victory a month back. “It took a very special actress to take on a role of this kind, and to do so to universal acclaim,” Tom Kelly intoned. The Prime Minister, he solemnly announced, had considered the Oscar “richly deserved”.
He’d taken time out from his busy schedule murdering Muslims to see the film, then, had he? Well, no, Kelly admitted. Not seen it. “Not as such”. But he had heard about it.
What had he heard about Michael Sheen’s performance, one mischievous hack wondered? But Kelly the Boy from Cultra – a devious cove, used to work in Belfast – believed he had spotted a trick question. The PM may not actually have seen the movie, he sniffed, but he was certainly aware that Michael Sheen wasn’t in it.
Mr. Sheen was, of course, much the best thing in the slurpy piece of bumsucking toadyism, turning in a perfectly creepy performance as the unctuous Blair.
The exchange recalled a 1997 Football Focus interview in which Blair spoke of his life-long infatuation with the game, mad eyes misting up as he fondly recalled that his “teenage hero” had been Newcastle United’s Jackie Milburn, whom he would regularly “watch from the seats behind the goal” at St James’s Park.
Milburn played his last game for Newcastle in 1957, when Blair was four years old. There were no seats behind either goal at St. James’s Park.
Plonker.
One of the multiple differences between myself and Blair is that I did see Jackie Milburn play. It was the glowing twilight of his career, admittedly, during his stint as player-manager with Linfield. And thus it was that I was perfectly positioned in the Brandywell when Mousey ran through his legs with the ball.
“Wor Jackie” – Jack and Bobby Charlton’s uncle, incidentally – had reverted to centre half by that stage. He was huge, maybe 6’3”, as I recall, and built like the side of a mountain. Mousey, at outside right, was commonly described in match reports as “diminutive.” Dinking in from the wing, confronted by Milburn with legs spread-eagled to prevent access to the area, Mousey stumbled forward to fall between the tree-trunk pegs of the Tyneside legend – and then scrambled up and out on the other side with the ball still at his feet, to ecstatic acclaim from the terraces.
You can see why I hesitated before putting this precious story in print. I’d hate to hear Blair adding Mousey’s day to the treasure-trove of stolen anecdotes in his false memory.
Went on to manage Drogheda, did Mousey, if I am not mistaken.
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But: Mirren, Mirren, off the wall, who’s the saddest disappointment of all?
Once upon a time, Ms. Mirren was a feisty republican and self-proclaimed enemy of “the ridiculous little monarchy.”
Now she’s a Dame of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and a crawler, suggesting in her Oscar acceptance speech (how I longed for the nuanced discretion of Sally Field) that the honour was not really hers, but could more properly be attributed to “the love” which Academy members felt for Queen Elizabeth II. “I wouldn’t be here without her.”
What a pity Forest Whittaker didn’t pop up straight afterwards to share the love, and acknowledge that he wouldn’t have been on the podium either without Idi Amin.
Now Ms. Mirren says that she’s “thrilled to bits” at the prospect of sipping Nambarrie with the Windsor woman. “I am much more nervous than before the Academy ceremony,” she simpers. Perhaps she can use her trip to the Palace for research purposes. I am told that her next role will be as a voice-over corgi in the animation epic, Barking Mad for Her Maj.
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Time now for my once-a-decade reminder – and special request for Declan Lynch, The Man Who Was There When Athlone Town Humbled The Mighty Milan – of how sports journalism ought to be written.
This is also a corrective directed towards all who sneered disdainfully at that picture of the lad in the Glasgow Celtic top outside Croker before the England game with a placard reading, “No Foreign Games”.
The 1924 match report by the Glasgow Observer’s Man in the Know leaves no room for doubt that the Hooped urchin had a far richer sense of sporting and political history than the We’re All Alickadoes Now crowd who reckoned they had struck a blow for tolerance and peace by snivelling with pleasure at the sound of ‘God Save The Queen.’
“On the Rangers terracing on Saturday, there was congregated a gang, thousands strong, including the dregs and scourings of filthy slumdom, unwashed yahoos, jailbirds, night-hawks, won’t-works, buroo-barnacles and pavement pirates, all, or nearly all, in the scarecrow stage of verminous trampdom. This ragged army of insanitary pests was lavishly provided with orange and blue remnants… Practically without cessation the vagabond scum kept up a strident chorus of the ‘Boyne Water.’ Nothing so bestially ignorant has ever been witnessed, even in the wildest exhibitions of Glasgow Orange bigotry.
“These complaints do not apply to the Celtic brake-clubs (supporters’ clubs), whose members, reasonable sentient human beings, are models of decorum and possess official testimonials to their blameless behaviour. They are fond of singing, and to this no-one can reasonably object. On Saturday, the boys sang to their hearts’ content. They gave us so many rousing choruses. ‘Hail Glorious St. Patrick’, ‘God Save Ireland’, ‘Slievenamon’, ‘The Soldier‘s Song’. When Cassidy’s goal made victory sure, it was fine to hear the massed thousands at the Ibrox oval chanting thunderously, ‘On Erin’s Green Valleys’.”
The result of the match was recorded thus: “Rebels two, Black and Tans nil.”
Now that, from an Irish nationalist point of view, was not a foreign game.
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That was my second favourite football quote of all time. My number one likewise illustrates the inextricable link between sporting and political passion. It’s from a ruling-class Gazette of 1740: “A Match of Futball was Cried at Kettering of five Hundred Men of a side, but the design was to pull down Lady Betty Jesamine’s mill.”