From: tonygordstein@number10.gov.uk
To: sirmarkrowley@met.police.uk
Subject: Maccabi Tel Aviv against Aston Villa
Mark,
Bit of a favour to ask you today: if you’ve time, read this and get back to me. The long and short of it is, I’m hoping you’ll put in a call to Craig Guildford at West Midlands Police for us. I’ll give you a bit of background and try not to go off on a tangent because there is so much going on with this story that it’s fried my head in the last couple of weeks.
So – Maccabi Tel Aviv against Aston Villa. You know the basics. WMP banned the away fans. We gave Keir a script to go public and accuse them of making the wrong decision, while dropping antisemitism into the sentence in a suggestive and loaded way. All good Labour Together stuff. The problem is that it isn’t really working out the way we’d planned. In the old days, all we had to do was mention antisemitism, and every careerist would run for cover. Now we have these independent MPs with Corbyn; it only takes one of them to push back, and it makes our life harder. The problem is that the MP for the area around Villa Park is one of them (Ayoub Khan). The thing with Khan is that he’s clever and he’s not afraid of us. He basically pushed Lisa Nandy into misleading parliament twice in one statement, just after the ban was announced. This is what the stupid bitch said at the despatch box:
This isn’t a decision to ban football hooligans; this is a decision to ban all away fans from a game which a safety advisory group has not done for nearly 25 years in this country, and it was a decision taken not on the grounds that he suggests, which was the risks posed by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. It was a decision taken in no small part because of the risk posed to them because they support an Israeli team and because they are Jewish.
On the banning away fans thing, we’re getting roasted on Reddit by actual Villa fans saying that a ban like that isn’t unusual, which TBH is true. Celtic and Rangers banned away fans for a couple of years between 2023 and 2025, and worse than that, Legia Warsaw fans were banned from Villa Park of all places in Nov 2023. I don’t know if you’ve seen that clip of a Legia fan throwing a jar of mayonnaise at Villa fans and then falling on his face (off the record, hilarious). The mayonnaise mishap, they called it on Villa forums. It went kind-of viral. I’d like to tell you that Nandy is some use in deciding what to do here, but no. I kid you not, she wanted to go back to parliament to say that the Legia Warsaw decision wasn’t relevant because Jews don’t like mayonnaise. Apparently, it’s traditional to put mustard on all those deli sandwiches. I mean, Jesus wept.
The ban lie isn’t that bad for us, though, because she was careful with her words and had remembered what Blair has been coaching us on since the election. Keir is on the phone with Blair nearly as often as I am with Mandy and they have it drummed into us how to mislead people and get away with it. What you do is very carefully tell a narrow technical version of the truth, while at the same time leaving a great big fucking lie as the main impression. So, she said ‘all away fans’ banned from a game ‘by a safety advisory group’ for ‘nearly 25 years’. So that means if a club banned all except a few, or the police banned them all without consulting the safety advisory group, or UEFA did it, or some other obscure difference, there are enough ways to wriggle out of it. If all else fails, we can say that two years is nearly 25 years because there are only 23 years between them!
We have a bigger problem with the last sentence about the reason for the ban, and that’s where I need your help. There is this guy in WMP called Chief Superintendent Tom Joyce who gave an interview to Sky News, and I’ll try to quote from it as exactly as I can because this is important:
I’m aware there’s a lot of commentary around the threat to the fans being the reason for the decision. To be clear that was not the primary driver…
He goes on a bit, but the gist of it is that they had a good chat with the Dutch police and gathered that Maccabi fans are violent bastards who shouldn’t come anywhere near Birmingham. I mean, that’s true, of course, but it’s not the point. The Sky News guy was well enough coached in the usual Sky way and did his best to push our narrative about antisemitism, but this Tom guy just batted him away like a pro. We’re thinking that it might be better to come from one Chief Constable to another, so if you could call Craig and work out what to do about Tom, we’d owe you one.
Maybe Craig could put out a statement that antisemitism has no place in safety advisory groups and that Tom Joyce had misspoken by recycling an ancient medieval antisemitic trope that Israeli football fans are not all nice people. Or we could get Tom himself to apologise and ‘clarify’ his statement. Nandy said the decision was in ‘no small part’ because they were Jewish, but he’s saying it wasn’t part of it at all. What we’ve been bouncing around the office is that if we can’t get away with ‘in large part’, we could maybe get Tom to make a statement to say that it was ‘in medium part’ because the Maccabi fans are vicious violent thugs who sing songs about raping Arabs, and another medium part but not as big a medium part that some of the local people in Birmingham that they would have attacked might have attacked them back. I think that could work because we could make it all so complicated that most people wouldn’t really understand what the hell he’s saying, and then we could spin it as a retraction.
If Tom won’t play ball with this then I hate to say it and don’t quote me, but you might have to ‘suggest’ an educational trip to Auschwitz to go with the apology for the trope, and if that doesn’t work it might have to be, ‘nice career you have there, Tom; shame if anything was to happen to it’. Just saying.
You’re probably wondering where Shabana Mahmood has been since the Home Secretary would normally be all over a police and public safety thing like this. We decided to keep her out of it and put Nandy up instead. Shabana’s constituency is in Birmingham, and most of her constituents hate her and want her out anyway, so we figure there is no point in adding to it. Plus, I was one of the people pushing for her to get the Home Secretary job, so it would be a bit embarrassing for me if she only lasted five minutes in it. She’s valuable to us because she is apparently a Muslim, but she’d basically hand her granny to the Israelis to be tortured if she thought it would help her career. There is this seductive mixture of ambition, greed, and cruelty about her that I’ve always found sexy. Anyway, the plan is to keep a wall around her while putting Nandy out front, but if possible, keeping both in their jobs till this thing blows over.
Anything you can do to help will be appreciated. It might even make the peerage more likely. I’m joking, of course – that process is totally separate and independent. (Wink!)
Your friend,
‘Tony’
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction but any similarities to a person or persons living or dead is exactly what we wanted.
This post was originally published on Canary.