Gary Neville

AS the former Manchester United and England right back Gary Neville took his seat for a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Monday, MP Lucy Powell leant over and congratulated him on being a star guest.

“One year we had Bill Clinton come,” she whispered. “So this is big.”

The party certainly seemed chuffed all week to have scored a celebrity booking in Neville.

He was later asked to join Sir Keir Starmer on the main stage for some matey-chops banter, presumably aimed at countering claims that the leader needs to come across as more relaxed.

Given he spends his day job making everything fellow Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher says sound clueless, it might have previously been assumed that Neville adopts the cunning tactic of always appearing the most intelli­gent in the room by stand­ing next to the thickest.

On this occasion, there seemed to be some levelling up, however, and quite the bromance built until the Holborn and St Pancras MP was tweeting about how great it was to have Neville on the team.

The footballer insisted he wouldn’t trade the commentary gantry for a seat in the Commons btw.

Anyhow, back to that fringe sesh with Ms Powell, and Neville could be found joining in the destruction of the notion that stuff like money can trickle down. The Premier League had a lot, the lower league clubs didn’t – and were at risk of folding, the meeting was told.

The bulk of the meeting was about whether new prime minister Liz Truss would agree to a new independent regulator for football and reminders that clubs were so important to towns and cities, and the people who follow them, that they can’t be treated simply like other businesses.

It was almost like they were comparing them to universal utilities too important not to be nationalised, but perhaps that was a step too far.

The key theme was there needed to be more of a “fans’ voice” in the running of the clubs. Thus followed nearly two hours of a rather circular conversation in which Neville kept repeat­ing that the government needed to “just get it done” and some of the audience began drifting out early having realised the main draw was not going to do a viral meltdown about the Glazer family – like he does on TV every Sunday night.

Slightly ironically, there was only about 10 minutes at the end of the meeting left to hear the supporters.

We heard lot from the new leaders about how more people were being reached.

Pretty determinedly, though, conference delegates in the main hall voted in favour of a motion backing electoral reform this week.

But will these fans’ voices really be heard?