Robert Jenrick's unlikely football memories

Robert Jenrick – shadow justice secretary and eternal Conservative leadership candidate – was scathing of the controversial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending their Europa League tie at Aston Villa next month.

“Growing up in the eighties, my dad took me to more than a few matches at Villa Park in the away end,” wrote Jenrick, who professes to be a Wolverhampton Wanderers fan, on, inevitably, X. “The language, chants, and antics were – at times – less than well-mannered.”

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And so they were – but how Jenrick père managed to take little Bobby J to “more than a few” Wolves away games at Villa Park is a tad more confusing. Having spent much of the decade in different divisions, Wolves played away at Villa just seven times in the 1980s, four times in the league, twice in the League Cup and once in the FA Cup.

For three of these games, Jenrick hadn’t been born, and for three he was, respectively, two months, one year and two years old. In fact, the only Wolves away game of the 1980s Jenrick could conceivably have attended and have any recollection of was his team’s 2-1 loss in the then Littlewoods Challenge Cup in September 1989, when Bobby J was seven. Perhaps that game – and Stuart Gray’s 63rd minute winner for Villa – was so memorable that Jenrick has convinced himself it happened countless times!

It’s not even the first time this month Jenrick has dragged his father into an attempt to burnish his man-of-the-people credentials. At the Conservative Party conference earlier this month he claimed his dad had been a lowly gas fitter, despite Bill Jenrick being chairman of fireplace manufacturers Charlton & Jenrick, a firm he started in 1986. He previously worked as finance director and then managing director of gas cooker company Cannon Industries, taking the company to record profits. Own goal for Jenrick!