Your obituary of Sir Philip Goodhart alludes to his “instrumental” role in the abolition of football’s maximum wage. This took the form of an adjournment debate on 21 November 1960 – a milestone of such significance that my co-editor, Alastair Campbell, and I commissioned a chapter on it for Football and the Commons People, our 1994 book in which 30 MPs, past or present, wrote on football.
Our frontispiece quoted Goodhart’s comparison, during his speech, between MPs and footballers, who “both suffer from acute insecurity of employment … We both do our work for the most part in public and our mistakes are subject to the harshest criticism.” This tickled his fellow-knight – Sir Stanley Matthews – when he launched the book in Westminster Hall: how could mere politicians possibly be compared with footballers?
