It seems there is a side to the former prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, that few knew existed. Until now. Newly released government documents have bizarrely revealed Blair’s keen interest in football in Northern Ireland. So much so that during his time as prime minister, he was apparently prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths to get an English Premier League football team to relocate there in the late 1990s.
Blair wanted the struggling Premier League side Wimbledon FC, based in south London since 1912, to move to Belfast. A memo dated 16 July 1998 – just months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed – recorded Blair’s view that ‘it would be excellent if Wimbledon were to move to Belfast and we should encourage this as much as possible’. Other previously confidential government papers reveal the official view that it would be a ‘significant breakthrough if Belfast had a football team playing in the English Premier League’ and that the move ‘should be able to build up strong cross-community support and provide a positive unifying force in a divided city’.
Recently football has come under growing threat from those keen to push some political or social agenda
One official note even suggested that Wimbledon FC could undergo a name change to Belfast United – a bizarre suggestion for a club with a rich history more than 400 miles away in London. Little consideration appears to have been given to the question of why any Belfast football fan might wish to support Wimbledon FC, even under a new name. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to those involved what the actual supporters of Wimbledon might make of their team moving to Northern Ireland, let alone the expense involved in attending ‘home’ games there.
Luckily for fans, the idea – more to do with satisfying Blair’s political needs rather than anything to do with football – never got off the ground. It was scuppered by the hostility of local football leaders who feared it could ‘kill off the game in Northern Ireland’. They at least had the advantage over the politicians of knowing something about the game itself and the fierce tribal loyalties of supporters.
Why were these discussions even taking place in government circles? In the eyes of Downing Street, Wimbledon FC may have appeared fair game because the club was struggling. It had not had a permanent football ground since 1991, following the Taylor Report into ground safety after the Hillsborough stadium disaster. Clubs were being encouraged to develop all-seater venues, and Wimbledon’s old Plough Lane ground was deemed unfit for redevelopment. The team was reduced to sharing Selhurst Park with Crystal Palace. Blair’s government sensed an opportunity to pounce, only to be thwarted by the groundswell of local opposition.
In fact, Wimbledon’s struggles did not end there. In 2004, after years of difficulties on and off the pitch, the club relocated to Milton Keynes and rebranded itself as the MK Dons. Some unhappy supporters set up a new breakaway club, AFC Wimbledon, who now play in League Two.
Would a move to Belfast and a new name for the team, as favoured by Blair, have been any worse, given everything that has happened since? Well, yes. The critical difference is that moving to Milton Keynes was a footballing decision, requiring permission from the Football Association, the game’s governing body. It was not a decision made by politicians for their own ends.
‘We don’t do God,’ the former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell is reputed to have said when Tony Blair was asked about his religious faith. Campbell later dismissed the statement as a throwaway remark but it serves to reflect a wider truth that politics and faith do not always mix well. Nor, for that matter, do politics and football. The game is many things: exciting, spectacular, beautiful, sometimes ugly. More recently though it has come under growing threat from politicians, activists and other busybodies, keen to push some political or social agenda.
Tony Blair was merely ahead of the times in seeing football as a means to scoring an easy political goal. He never quite understood that he had no business trying to move Wimbledon FC to Belfast, and that it was not for ministers to decide what name a football team should play under. Fans everywhere should be relieved and grateful that Blair did not get his way.
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