Hoey a tireless captain of the awkward squad

Despite relegation to the back benches, former Sports Minister remains passionate champion of grassroots interests

Sports ministers come, and sports ministers go, and rarely do they make much of an impression except with their backsides on the best seats in the directors' box. An exception to this depressing rule, however, is Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall. She is plainly a woman of integrity, principles and percipience, as well as being a PE graduate with a sincere passion for sport, so naturally she was wrestled out of the job before she could make a real success of it.

Not, she thinks, that any sports minister gets to wield much influence. "The problem," she tells me, "is that if you don't go along with prevailing Government opinion, which is often a view they have arrived at on the basis of no understanding of sport, but because it fits into a wider agenda, then you can't do what you want to do. And if you say that's wrong, you don't last in the job very long. The only way is to keep your head down and just enjoy going to lots of sports events. I wasn't that kind of sports minister." A naughty smile enters her Northern Irish eyes. "Richard [Caborn, the incumbent] will probably stay in the job for quite a long time."

We are sitting in Hoey's spacious office in Westminster. There are, on a shelf, several cards bearing pictures of the late Colin Cowdrey. "He used to send me little notes saying what should be happening. He was a lovely man." On the wall, too, are photographs of her with Frankie Dettori, her with Tony Adams (of whose Sporting Chance addiction clinic she is a patron), her with Harry Kewell. But also her with a women's judo team, her with her local angling preservation society. She derives as much pleasure from her association with the small fry, as with the stars. Maybe more.

Indeed, she caused a right old flap on becoming sports minister by insisting that she got to read every letter from every disaffected user of every under-funded local authority swimming-pool. A Sir Humphrey-type figure would say: "Local authority swimming pools are nothing to do with you, minister."

"And I would say: 'Then what is the point of being minister?' She smiles. "With my PE background, I knew when I was getting briefings that were complete nonsense, and civil servants, on the whole, don't like that."

And so to the issues. This was to have been the day for a Government announcement on an Olympic bid for 2012, but it is also the day after an army cordon was posted around Heathrow Airport. Hoey has just heard that the announcement has been postponed. "With tanks round Heathrow, the Prime Minister has probably decided that it's not the best time to talk about the Olympics," she observes, wryly.

"But there is no way we should even think about the Olympics unless it has 100 per cent Government support, from a Government totally committed to sport, not because certain people in Government think it might make good photo-opportunities. It is not just about money, it's about a commitment to take responsibility. But the Government's view seems to be the same as it is towards congestion-charging. They want to have their cake and eat it. They haven't really said whether they're for or against congestion-charging, so if it goes well, they can say it had their support, and if it's a mess, they can blame it on Ken [Livingstone]. They want all the good things that go with an Olympic bid, but they know they will run into difficulties, as any country hosting it does.

"And there is no point having the Olympics in 2012, then not winning very much because funding has been cut back. It is so important that, if we go for it, not a penny of the money that currently goes into sport is taken away. My fear is that the further in we get, more and more sports will be told in various ways: 'Sorry, we can't do that because we've got the Olympic Games'."

It occurs to me, listening to all this, that perhaps Hoey is better placed shouting dissent from the main stand than she was officiating out on the pitch. True, she can't brandish yellow cards any more, but she can make more of a racket, as she did recently in Parliament when asking why athletes from the Republic of Ireland should benefit from Lotto money.

"People who buy lottery tickets in my constituency think that a share of the money is going to British sport, but some of it is being used to finance Irish athletes competing against British athletes, which I think is outrageous," she argues. "Cycling and a couple of other sports have all-Ireland governing bodies, and you have this strange situation where in the Commonwealth Games there are athletes competing for Northern Ireland who, in the Olympics, represent Ireland. Anyway, I caused huge confusion, because nobody knew what I was talking about."

Hoey chuckles; no one could accuse her of taking herself too seriously. I ask whether her reservations about all-Ireland teams extend to rugby union? "Oh yes. When I was sports minister I went to Twickenham a lot. I became quite close to Clive Woodward. And I had no hesitation cheering on England against Ireland. The tricolour is not my flag."

For Northern Ireland, though, she is a tireless advocate. And if that means laying into the English, so be it. "I get very cross that they won't consider restoring the Home Nations football championships. It was so greedy and mean of England and Scotland to end it. After all, things come and go, and Wales are doing very well at the moment. They should have it every two years. It would make such a difference financially to Northern Ireland, and England has a responsibility to help the smaller nations."

This word, responsibility, she uses again and again. Nothing seems to irk her so much as folk who shirk their responsibilities, which is why she watched with horror the imbroglio over the cricket World Cup. Had she still been sports minister, I fancy that heads would have been knocked together.

But I cannot get her to subscribe to the argument, eloquently advanced by my colleague, James Lawton, among others, that it was hypocritical of the Government to expect sport to take a moral lead regarding Zimbabwe with no equivalent pressure on business interests.

"Whether sport likes it or not," she says, "it is high-profile. Pulling out of a cricket match was something [Robert] Mugabe was likely to understand symbolically, far more than a British Airways plane not flying into Harare, or a company withdrawing its business. That, I'm afraid, goes with the game.

"But what I found depressing was the buck-passing between the Foreign Office and the sports minister, and the huge sums the ECB must have spent on lawyers, enough to keep 100 cricket clubs going, I should think. When they say that if they lose money it will have to go from the grass-roots, I would challenge that. I would suggest that they could lose a few of their top-weight officials. Certainly, it was very damaging for [the ECB chief executive] Tim Lamb, and for the new chairman, who gave no real leadership."

Speaking of leadership, she would like, she says, to have been a benevolent dictator as sports minister, with unrestricted authority. Had that been the case, what would she have done? "I would have completely reorganised the sports councils, and given the British Olympic Association a substantial amount of influence and power over all Olympic sports. I have a lot of confidence in the BOA, it's a very sound organisation.

"The problem at the moment is that money is given to the various sports councils, and by the time it gets down through the mechanism to where it's really needed, it's gone in administration costs. And they [the sports councils] are always coming up with new initiatives, so that sports and clubs have to change what they're doing to apply for this new pot of money.

"You can be happily running a really good judo club – there's one I know near Hemel Hempstead – bringing in lots of young people, but in order to get the money you have to bring in more people of a certain age, or a certain number of black kids. There's always something happening to change the way those clubs are working. Nobody is saying: "This is great, what do you need to make it better?" Which is often something simple, like getting rid of rate relief."

In essence, she would change the whole institutionalised view of sport in this country, which is easier said than done to the power of about a million.

"I just want to get the Government to see sport in the way other governments do. Whether the Prime Minister likes a particular football team," which, of course, we know he does, after his stirring reminiscences of sitting in the, er, all-standing Gallowgate End of St James' Park, "doesn't mean we have a Government that cares about and understands sport. Even now, they're only just realising that spending money on sports facilities will improve the health of youngsters and keep them away from crime.

"But it's still very low on the list of priorities. Physical education is greatly undervalued, which is why some parents make big sacrifices to send their children to private schools, because they have a healthier attitude to sport than in the state sector. The Government has failed dismally in its policy to protect school playing fields. I don't care what anyone says, they are still being sold off. And the excuse is that, whenever they sell, the money goes back into the school. But I don't think that selling a playing field to equip an IT room is a good deal."

Her criticism, sadly, will not stop this practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is endemic in all areas of Government, and endemic, too, in sport.

Hoey bitterly begrudges the £120m of lottery money handed to the Wembley Stadium project, for instance; indeed, though a devoted Arsenal fan, she liked to point out during her all-too-short tenure that she was minister for sport, not minister for football. The disproportionate attention given to football irritates and worries her still. And she does not spare her disdain when referring to the failed World Cup bid, championed by her predecessor, Tony Banks.

"It was so obvious England was going to win, in spite of all the facts which suggested England was not going to win. We didn't even have the support of Uefa." Moreover, it remains her conviction that the World Cup bid was a prime cause of the Wembley débâcle that loomed large and ugly over her time as minister.

"Certainly, the decision not to have a running-track was based on the need for a World Cup bid to have Wembley at its centre," she says, adding that she regrets the wholesale redevelopment of Wembley.

"Once they decided to knock it down, getting rid of the historical, magical value of it – never mind what a crappy place it was inside; once they were doing that, and deciding not to revamp it inside, which I would have done, then I'm not sure it's the best place any more. I'd have gone for the Birmingham option. Because there is nothing special about Wembley as a place. This will really upset the MP for Wembley, but who wants to go there hours beforehand and wander around, as people do in Cardiff?"

With this rhetorical question hanging in the air, the telephone rings. Hoey's secretary reminds her that there is an important vote in the House, which she must attend. There is just time to ask her what British triumph she would most like to see in the world of sport. England's footballers winning the World Cup, perhaps? Northern Ireland qualifying for the World Cup?

"No," she says. "I think, more than anything, I'd love to see England winning the Ashes back, with the last deciding Test match played in my constituency at The Oval, where I am an honorary vice-president. That would be wonderful." And with that fantasy she leaves for the vote; whether unquestioningly to toe the party line I somehow doubt.

Kate Hoey the life and times

Born: Co Antrim, Northern Ireland, 26 June 1946.

Lives: Tower Hill, London.

Family: Single. Former partner of Tom Stoddart, photographer, whom she met in Mexico at the 1986 football World Cup.

1965: Becomes Northern Ireland high-jump champion.

1972: Joins the Labour Party.

1978: Becomes councillor for Hackney Borough Council, east London, until 1982.

1985: Educational advisor to Arsenal, until 1989. Still a Gunners fan.

1988: Becomes councillor for Southwark Borough Council, south London, until 1989.

1989: Becomes Labour MP for Vauxhall, south London, after a by-election; still holds the seat today.

1997: Appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Frank Field, Minister for Welfare Reform, after election of Labour Government in 1997. Announces she will not support a bill that will ban hunting, one of very few Labour MPs to do so.

1998: Appointed Minister in the Home Office.

1999: Becomes first woman Sports Minister, and holds this position until asked to step down by Tony Blair in 2001. As well as football, Hoey follows cricket and is an honorary vice-president of Surrey.

She says: "Since I am no longer Sports Minister I have more time to be sporty. Sport has never been able to [wield] influence with the same success as the Arts. This is rather ironic because, when I was minister, I found sport was riven with back-stabbing and constant infighting – much more so than the House of Commons."

They say: "She never had a grasp of what work had been put in and what had been done to accommodate athletics before she came into office. She was obsessed with athletics, while what we were seeking was a system that accommodated it, but not to the detriment of football, which was going to provide the money." Ken Bates, Chelsea chairman, in June 2001 on Hoey's involvement with plans to rebuild Wembley Stadium.