Mawhinney: 'A breakaway is not on the agenda'

Perhaps it was the House of Commons setting, but seated on a bench in the magnificent, if draughty Westminster Hall, Sir Brian Mawhinney MP was toeing the party line as doggedly as if the chief whip was glaring over his shoulder. Not, this time, the Conservative Party, of which he was chairman from 1995 to 1997, but the Football League, with whom he has held the same position for the past two months.

If there was a surprise, it was the number of times he smiled, this "Ulster hard-man" (The Times), "more tough than tender" (Guardian), of whom one former colleague said, "he seems permanently grumpy". Possibly sport lightens him up. Barely 100 yards away in the debating chamber fellow MPs were discussing whether to go to war, and outside the demonstrators' loudhailers were demanding "welfare, not warfare... children, not body-bags". York City's financial problems and even the Worthington Cup suddenly seemed rather small beer, but he was not having that.

"Life is multi-dimensional. It would really be a terrible country to live in if the overriding passion of all 58 million citizens was politics. Right? Life is work, it's leisure, it's relaxation, it's family, it's business, it's politics, it's church, it's humanitarian concern, it's the local voluntary group. Football plays an important part within that broad panoply."

At 62, Mawhinney's own life has encompassed most of those aspects, starting in East Belfast as a rugby-playing (and refereeing), church-going football supporter of the appropriately named Crusaders, and – for unexplained reasons – Arsenal. It is tempting to say that what the crisis-riven Football League board saw in his CV since becoming the member for Peterborough in 1979 (Cambridgeshire North West since 1997) was vast experience of conflict and attempting to bring, or keep, different factions together: the General Synod, Conservative Trade Unionists, the Northern Ireland office, Health and Transport departments, chairman of the party for the 1997 election débâcle. Enough aggravation to make anyone grumpy, which he did become when protesters at a government bill once threw paint over him, occasioning a friend's not entirely sympathetic remark that "he was overcome by emulsion".

His version of this latest challenge is: "One or two friends were kind enough to say that they thought some of the experiences I'd had and some of the skills I'd developed might be useful to the League. Also a politician is embedded in his or her community, called a constituency; football is of all the sports almost part of the nation's culture and ought to be attractive to people whose job is in the community."

Another friend, the more down-to-earth Peterborough United manager Barry Fry, declared: "Chairman of the Football League is an impossible job. There's 72 different chairmen wanting 72 different things, so you've got no effing chance, have you?" The previous incumbent Keith Harris, who presided over the ITV Digital fiasco that cost the clubs millions of pounds, had walked out talking of "handing the asylum back to the lunatics" and advising his successor to consult his lawyer and then his shrink.

But Fry says that if someone has to run the madhouse, then better Mawhinney than most: "He's a strong character, a man of great beliefs. If he thinks someone's doing something wrong, he'll tell them." The first example has come with a letter fired off to the Government last week telling them League clubs are not prepared to pay for policing costs outside grounds, as has been proposed by the Association of Chief Police Officers.

In the main, however, there has been no making waves, no rocking of boats. If delivering a sporting sermon for the League's showpiece in Cardiff today – he is an evangelical lay preacher – Mawhinney's text might be, "Blessed are the peacemakers". The factions this time are not unionists and republicans, or Europhiles and Euro-sceptics, but the First Division clubs and the rest. "I don't think it's a great secret that I walked into an impasse between them. The First Division see the value of having their own chief executive while the Second and Third Divisions lay a good deal of stress on the importance of having an overall League chief executive."

And which does the new chairman favour? A politician replies: "We've got to find a way to try to resolve that quite sharp difference of opinion. I have one or two ideas as to how we might be able to meet some of the aspirations of both viewpoints but we're not ready to go public yet." What he can confirm is that the First Division clubs, however keen to protect their own interests and understandably envious of the Premier League's riches, are not talking of splits and breakaways. "I understand the history and all I can tell you truthfully is that absolutely no one has even hinted to me that any division or any club wants to get out of the League. Quite the contrary. The first resolution passed [by the First Division clubs] was their commitment to the 72-club Football League. It's not on anybody's agenda and not on mine."

What is on the Mawhinney agenda is not easy to ascertain. A wage cut for players whose clubs are relegated, it appears, which the Professional Footballers' Association immediately opposed; not the long-overdue regionalisation of the lower divisions, nor part-time football. The first item, it eventually emerges, is stability: "I've come into this job with a series of real pressures on the 72 clubs. The first priority I ought to have is to work with the clubs and officers to get a degree of stability going forward. When eventually I leave I'd like people to say that perhaps he made some contribution toward greater financial stability and I'd like fans to be saying football's even more fun and more exciting than a few years ago. There may be other issues we can resolve over a period of time, but as two general aspirations I think I'll settle for those two."

And giving a wide berth to protesters with paint pots.