No Nonsense Page 19

  For the record, I have variously quoted authors, inventors, politicians and philosophers because I happened to be reading them at the time, and they matched my mood or stimulated my interest. The accelerated development of social media coincided with a period of my life when I consciously decided to push my boundaries. I had time on my hands and brain cells to spare, since I was sober and no longer a city-centre accident, waiting to happen.

  I wasn’t under any illusion. The average person on the street had a really negative opinion of me. Harsher elements of my character, a necessary evil that enabled me to survive St John’s and football’s rat runs, were refracted through the prism of the mass media. To address the misconceptions I had to approach things differently.

  Peter Kay, typically, was the catalyst. He challenged me to challenge myself. What was I actually interested in? What did I want to get into? I became a knowledge junkie, and started by studying the contrasting characters of Churchill and Roosevelt, through the political and military strategies of the Second World War. I read voraciously and the identity of the historical figure with whom I most identified may not surprise you.

  It was Genghis Khan.

  He is portrayed as the epitome of evil with good reason, considering that he was responsible for the massacre of millions, yet his achievements would have been impossible had he been the savage barbarian he is popularly depicted as. He united the Mongols, ruled over a vast empire, delegated responsibility to his generals and set up lines of communications in an era in which messages were delivered on horseback.

  He introduced a uniform system of writing, practised meritocracy and encouraged religious tolerance. He opened up the Silk Route and expanded trade and cultural contact with Christian Europe and Muslim tribes in Southwest Asia. Before his death, and burial in an unmarked grave in Mongolia, he appointed his successor and assigned special responsibilities to his sons and grandsons. That is an incredible feat of leadership.

  Similarly, Churchill, the classic wartime leader, fascinated me because of the contrast between his inspirational public persona and his darker, deeper, more fallible private side. He was disliked on an individual level by those closest to him, but understood the power of solidarity and the human spirit.

  I’ve little time for mundane people who are afraid of engagement and prefer to coast along the middle lane of life. I tried to get there once, but found my niche on the margins. It is important to interact. If you have an opinion, express it. But if someone asks you to share your views, make sure you’ve got credibility through research and reason.

  I used to randomly pontificate on things I didn’t truly grasp simply because I’d been asked to do so. I knew, deep down, no one really gave a shit what I thought, and they were probably waiting to catch me out, but I figured the worst thing they could do would be to ignore me. This may be counterintuitive to some of my critics, but social media stopped me becoming a rent-a-quote mediocrity.

  I’d been alerted to Twitter by Andy ‘Tagger’ Taylor. He was working with Newcastle for Puma at the time, and was evangelical about the potential of a platform which gave me the ability to bypass the threshing process of old-media bias and superficiality. I had quietly joined it in June 2010 without posting, and studied it for nearly a year before taking the plunge. What did I have to lose?

  I had a new medium to match a new mindset. It might have been the equivalent of letting a pyromaniac loose in a firework factory, but initial trivialities gave way to something more strategic, as I discovered I could set my own agenda. No more quotes taken out of context to suit a warped narrative. No more leaks about me, full of holes.

  This was a rapier compared to the baseball bat wielded by the Newcastle board, who became increasingly distracted by my candour and carefully planned defiance. As my audience grew with a speed that staggered me, I could distance myself from football’s exaggerated importance, and address a range of subjects that moved me, from music to social injustice.

  I want to stress I am not claiming any credit here, because I remain in awe of the Hillsborough families, whose refusal to yield in the face of institutionalised abuse, criminality and deceit resulted in justice for their loved ones, in the form of a jury’s verdict that the victims had been unlawfully killed. But their heroic 27-year pursuit of truth gave me an insight into my sudden ability to assist change.

  I used Twitter to support campaigners’ calls for the government to withdraw opposition to full disclosure of documents relating to the disaster. It was a small, heartfelt gesture; over the course of a day I posted 40 or so tweets, urging right-minded readers to sign an electronic petition. I lobbied celebrities to amplify my calls, and the 100,000 signatures required to force an emergency debate were soon secured.

  I was consumed by a sense of pride, for my city rather than myself, and a feeling of immense privilege when I was invited to be in the gallery at the House of Commons to hear Steve Rotheram, MP for Liverpool Walton, give the speech that held the authorities to account. It is easy to be cynical about the playground pettiness of party politics, but this, surely, was democracy in action.

  Inevitably, startled media corporations and football industry insiders tried to put me back in my box. They lampooned me as a Nietzsche-quoting jailbird. They simply couldn’t get their heads around a footballer prepared to talk about something other than his latest car, his PlayStation skills, or the banging tunes he picked up on in Ibiza. Truth be told, I enjoyed creating confusion. It was stimulating. They were like ageing, lazy cats, trying to catch a lively young mouse.

  Some of my most infamous targets, such as the illiterates on TOWIE, the shy and retiring Piers Morgan and the Brazilian captain of PSG, Thiago Silva, were selected mischievously. Others, like Alan Shearer and his deceptively doe-eyed chum Gary Lineker, had deeper significance. Of course, I made rash snap judgements, most notably when I prematurely dismissed Neymar as football’s answer to Justin Bieber. It was all part of the fun of the fair.

  Already, digital communications are so pervasive that I find myself yearning for the innocence of a handwritten letter, or the clarity of a telephone call over a landline. Twitter has a built-in obsolescence, because, as Stephen Fry suggested, there are now too many people in the swimming pool, but the principle of instant, direct and personal communication is here to stay.

  Trolls are becoming increasingly vindictive, an affront to basic decency, and need sorting out. I’ve got a degree of self-protection, since I have learned to zone out from abuse that comes with the territory. Being booed every time I touch the ball, and being told by knuckle-draggers that I’m a piece of shit, tends to dull the senses.

  The dullards who took the piss when I dwelled upon the disciplines of philosophy, and recycled the wisdom of men like Aristotle, Seneca and Plato, spectacularly missed the point. My interest was the result of a deeper way of thinking, inquisitiveness rather than pretension. I have become conditioned to looking beyond the obvious.

  Look at a glass of water, for instance. Most people see it literally, as a container filled with clear fluid. I’m now disposed to look at it from different angles. I’ll study the sunlight glinting through the glass, and across the liquid. I’ll recognise the beauty in the fragmentation of the ice. I’ll appreciate the zest of the lemon slice, and the practicality of the plastic straw.

  If you are wondering, by the way, I’ve been in worse places than Pseuds Corner.

  The old me demanded information and reached an immediate conclusion. Bang. Now I defer judgement, because I’m interested in other people’s take on things. I may not agree with an alternative point of view, but I learn much more by not being so dogmatic. People fascinate me, because of the iceberg effect. There is so much going on beneath the surface.

  I always thought I would be smart enough to avoid jail, and can understand people thinking, ‘It will never happen to me’, because they believe it takes an extreme set of circumstances to end up behind bars. The criminal system is screaming out for reform because it is paraly
sed by people who thought they were a million miles away from jail, when they were only a heartbeat from being locked up.

  Think of a prison as a deep-sea trawler. The lowest of the low get hauled in, but what shocked me was the arbitrary nature of the rest of the catch. It includes victims of circumstance, like the family man who had two drinks too many and hurt innocent bystanders in a car crash. It ensnares dim-witted petty criminals and desperate credit defaulters. Before you ask, I deserved to be in there with them.

  My best personality trait is my mental agility. I can condense situations into bite-sized chunks, and deal with adversity or success without getting carried away by either. Most people never have a go at life because they are too scared of failing. They never jump off the diving board because they are afraid of making a splash. Me? I bomb from the top board for bloody Britain . . .

  I find balance in madness, which helps because things don’t always work according to plan. Experiences I felt were grave setbacks, like going to jail, ended up as genuine blessings. What I initially regarded as a blessing, fame, tricked me into making mistakes. I can cope across what we are taught to consider a rigid social structure. Within two or three years of being in a cell I was in the owners’ enclosure at Royal Ascot, interacting with the privileged minority.

  I am proud of my working-class heritage, without being obsessed by it. I think someone from my background cherishes education and intellectual advancement, because social mobility, to give it its political buzz phrase, is a relatively recent phenomenon. My chance came through the development of football as mass entertainment in an age of huge technological change.

  I fitted the prejudicial working-class stereotype, by drinking and fighting. I can remember sitting in jail thinking, ‘Fuck this. This is not me. This is not what I want to represent.’ I sifted through the wreckage of the train crash and realised the driver was out of control, off his head.

  I like listening to people who give a fuck, people who care, like Sir Dave Brailsford, cycling’s innovator. I enjoy assessing their journeys and processes. I can relate to some, but not to others. Success doesn’t just happen and successful people are not preordained. Some have it tough before they get there, others coast towards it. They find their own way. They have their own treasure maps.

  I wouldn’t recommend following mine, but I was lucky in finding something to love. Football is my passion. Not in an unadulterated way, like a fan, who has an almost happy ignorance of reality. Things can never be the same once you are inside the game. It is like discovering Mum and Dad arranging your presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. Dreams dissolve in an instant.

  But it gave focus to my battle to survive. I learned to enjoy the sunny days, the fleeting brightness, because I came to terms with the fact that there would also be shitty days, when bad stuff happens. I was determined to let nothing pass me by. Imagine reaching 70, 80, and being told you have a terminal illness, knowing you’ve had your head down for so long you have never enjoyed the view.

  I’m not intimidated by opportunity. People tuned in to Question Time to watch me, on the most popular political programme in the UK, because they expected to see some sort of performing chimpanzee. They were evidently surprised to discover a footballer whose knowledge extended beyond an appreciation of the sauces on offer at Nando’s.

  I was writing for the Big Issue at the time, exploring an unlimited range of topics which included the future of the NHS, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the scourge of unemployment, the pernicious influence of Olympic sponsors, and England’s chronic cultural fear of ambition. I wasn’t a role model, and my views lacked the gravity of a great sportsman like Shaun Edwards coming out in support of the miners, but I understood the power of my profile.

  David Beckham can project the shiny One Direction version of football, but that’s not my reality. I like to think I prove that big mistakes are not necessarily fatal. I knew I would walk into that TV studio undervalued and underestimated. They’d expect a monosyllabic malcontent who couldn’t hold a conversation.

  The prevailing view of me in media central was voiced by Jeremy Paxman, when he introduced me on Newsnight as ‘a man with two convictions for violence and one appearance for England’. Fair do’s, though he was, by that time, straying into the realms of caricature himself. Question Time obviously suspected I was box office, because they spent 18 months trying to get me to appear.

  If this was going to be regarded as my cup final, I decided to prepare for it appropriately. I asked the lady who wanted to book me for the programme to invite me behind the scenes. I had grown up watching the programme, and was aware that a lot of people were waiting to see my facade crumble, but I came away from the live transmission convinced I could hold my own.

  I attended the post-show dinner, hosted by David Dimbleby, and sat next to Iain Duncan Smith, who had been the most polished guest, along with Theo Paphitis, the Millwall-supporting entrepreneur. The former Tory leader was pensions secretary at the time, and I disagreed with many of his political principles, but I related to him as a person. The enemy was out of uniform, and although his world view was completely different from mine he gave me an idea of what I was getting into.

  It was a good recce mission, as was an invitation to address the Oxford Union. I spoke for an hour on topics as varied as homophobia in football, social marketing, and the merits of my education in the university of life. The experience enabled me to frame my thoughts, and introduced me to the disciplines of proper preparation.

  Despite the storied setting, my approach wasn’t a lot different from football: I formulated a game plan, based upon a summary of my strengths and a reasoned analysis of the threat represented by the opposition. It made a change to line up against planet-brained students rather than pea-brained midfield enforcers.

  I had two coaches for Question Time, philosophy lecturer Raj Sehgal and Charlie Lesser, a retired coffee trader who had also enrolled on Raj’s course at Roehampton University in southwest London. We had different perspectives on life, and the political process. It was refreshing for me, since my closest professional relationships are, inevitably, focused on the common ground of football.

  Realistically, I had to appear on the programme outside the football season, so I agreed to do one based at Heathrow airport. I shared a panel that included universities and science minister David Willetts, shadow Scottish secretary Margaret Curran, UKIP MEP Louise Bours, and some jumped-up journo named Piers Morgan.

  Raj commandeered a classroom and set up a mock programme. The only difference was this one lasted three days, instead of an hour. The first day involved Raj, me, and a whiteboard. We explored my beliefs, and drilled down into the issues of the day. The second featured politics students, rounded up with the promise that they could go for the jugular. The third was a caffeine-fuelled wrap-up. It left me wondering what on earth I had let myself in for.

  There was an element of educated guesswork in the preparation. Plans for a new Heathrow runway were obviously going to be on the agenda. The seemingly endless Chilcot inquiry was grinding on. UKIP were somehow squaring the circle of reviling Europe and contending in the European elections. I had no intention of making use of my specialist subject, football. A win for me was not making a fool of myself.

  The final council of war was convened at breakfast on the day of the broadcast. It included Raj, Charlie, Georgia and Nan, who was appalled when I told her I wasn’t going to be wearing a suit. I didn’t want to dress as a politician; I had no party affiliation although, like many sportsmen with a high public profile, I had been courted by them all.

  I had no need of their regalia, the three-piece suit and colour-coded tie. I wanted to be myself. No one goes to a cricket match dressed as a cricketer, unless they are puddled. You shouldn’t go to a football match dressed as a footballer unless you’re below the age of eight. I wasn’t on there as a machine politician. I wanted to be seen as the representative of a different demographic, and that was that. I hau
led on smart casual trousers and a John Smedley tee-shirt.

  Some people still expect me to be frothing at the mouth when they meet me. You can see the conflict in their faces, because they are baffled by the contrast between what they have been led to expect, and what is standing right in front of them. They have bought the bollocks, which is understandable because we all judge strangers in isolation.

  I might have survived Strangeways, and played in front of a capacity crowd at Wembley, but Joe Barton is no different from Joe Blow. I was petrified when I was miked up and plonked on that panel. My imagination was in overdrive; I had this vision of millions sitting down to watch me star in car-crash TV. This was not a classroom, where I could ask for time to gather my thoughts. It was cameras, lights, action. I was in the modern equivalent of the lions’ den.

  The 15-minute warm-up section, before we go live from the floor of Terminal Two, doesn’t do too much to ease the nerves. It gives me just enough time to agree with Piers that travel companies are exploiting hard-pressed parents, who are prevented from taking advantage of cheaper holidays in term time.

  The theme tune strikes up, and Dimbleby is off and running. We’re five minutes in, but it feels like 25. I finally get into the conversation, but I don’t hear the applause for my disdain for the European parliament because I’m in the zone. It kicks off with the UKIP panellist, a sour woman representing a sad, dangerous party. I make an analogy about four ugly birds. I think it works, but then I worry. ‘Shit, you’ve put your foot in it. You’re fucked.’

  I question the redaction of evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, and draw comparisons with the Hillsborough families’ struggle for justice. Those who lost sons and daughters in the Iraq war have an identical right to the truth. I admit to nimbyism, because I live under the flightpath, and oppose a third runaway at Heathrow. I call for the government to combat obesity by introducing a voucher scheme for lower income families to buy fresh fruit and vegetables.