POLICOMM ... all together

Michael Foot - the football fan

The football fan

Michael supported Plymouth Argyle for about 90 years, through thin and thin. He was completely mad about them. I ran into him when he had just stood down as Labour leader, around 1984. I  was milling around outside the ground and Michael came stomping over and said: “You’re Argyle fans – where do we stand?” We stood on the terraces together and as we left he said, “well, you must ring”, as he didn’t have any chums to go to Argyle with. So I rang. From then we went to loads of games.
When he was 90, in 2003, I thought, what can you give a man like Michael Foot? We registered him as a player with the Football League, the oldest ever. We gave him a squad number, 90, so he appeared in the programmes for the whole season. In a speech I announced he was being hired as a left-winger, with strict instructions from the manager never to stray anywhere near the centre and certainly nowhere near the right.
Peter Jones, former vice-chairman of Plymouth Argyle FC, and longtime friend