Hoey jousts with a knight on first day

The first lady of sport has quickly tackled the demands of the job.

WOMEN SPORTS ministers are no longer the rare birds they used to be. The UK follows France, Holland, Turkey, Norway, Australia and Canada in appointing a Manageress. Even Guatemala had one once. Kate Hoey, now the first lady of British sport, has drive, energy and ambition. As she juggled with the spheroid accoutrements of football, rugby and cricket after her installation on Thursday afternoon, someone remarked that she was a woman with balls. She'll need to be, now the boots are already going in.

Although Tony Banks will be no easy act to follow in the high-profile stakes, Hoey is likely to keep Tony Blair happy by concentrating the nation's focus on the back pages rather than the front. She may never match Banks for rhetoric or raciness, though she has already shown an equal capacity for the foot-in-mouth syndrome, having to backtrack within 24 hours of landing the job after blasting Manchester United for treating their fans "in a shabby way" over the FA Cup. "Disgraceful and ignorant," retorted Sir Alex Ferguson. How long, we wonder, before Hoey starts making Banks sound like a pussycat?

A former captain of the Belfast Royal Academy athletics and netball teams who created parliamentary history by making her maiden speech on football. As a schoolgirl she fell in love with the game which she watched from a folding stool at Windsor Park. Later she bicycled 20 miles every day from the family small holding to be coached by Maeve Kyle at Ballymena Athletics Club and once out-high jumped a young domestic science teacher named Mary Peters for the Northern Ireland title. "I did the straddle, which shows my age," she said. (She is now 53.) A dedicated Arsenal fan, she once taught the young players of that club - and others in London - the social niceties, such as which knife and fork to use in a posh restaurant, to help finance her early political career.

So her grass roots grow deeper than her predecessor's and she's lost no time in scoring some populist points in slagging off Manchester United for opting out of the FA Cup and condemning the demolition of Wembley's Twin Towers. She likes a bandwagon, does Kate, and she'll be strident about school sports and playing fields, too.

Some of her policies will be in direct contrast to those propounded by Banks. She won't be pushing for big events to be held in the capital at the expense of sport in inner cities and she'll be challenging how some of the National Lottery money is spent - or perhaps misspent. But her support for fox hunting could be as contentious as Banks' support for Chelsea, and 2006 and all that.

A foxy, indeed feisty, lady is now in charge of our games but generally she'll be welcomed as someone who knows the score. Her relationship with the media will certainly be chummier. The prickly Banks reckoned there were those of us he would cheerfully throttle but matey Katy has been known to sup the odd lager with the boys from the broadsheets and her long-time partner whom she met at the last Mexico World Cup is a magazine photographer. Despite her love for football, she insists: "I'm minister of sport, not minister of football." Just a few weeks ago Banks was telling us the same thing, although few listened. He also hinted at jumping before he was shoved saying in an interview in these pages: "The only person who will decide whether I see this job through is me."

So it proved. Lately he has been tired and drawn. He was known to be anguished in Los Angeles when he learned that the World Cup vote would be delayed for a further two months and I understand he made the decision to quit on his return, although he had threatened to resign regularly since the day he took the job 27 months ago. "He hasn't been a happy bunny for some time," observed his opposite number, Richard Spring, recently. He was, in his own words, "thoroughly pissed off" by media hostility over his request that United should compete in the World Club Championship in the cause of 2006. He felt he had been made a scapegoat for pushing the government line and let down by his bosses when it came to the crunch.

He once told me: "One of these days I will tell them exactly where to stuff this job." Well, he may not have handed in his notice to Blair in those terse terms but it was definitely his idea to go and concentrate on the 2006 bid, which he felt was impinging on his ministerial role. In fact, Blair wanted him to stay as minister until after the 2006 decision next year, fearing his departure would send out the wrong signals to Fifa but Banks felt he was being suffocated by bureaucracy. He set out to be a hands-on minister but those hands were tied by red tape. "The job is incredibly high on profile but light on executive power," he said yesterday.

Whatever the future holds - and he confirmed to me yesterday that he is now giving serious thought to running for Mayor of London - I believe a big job awaits Banks in football, bigger even than being the Prime Minister's special envoy for the 2006 campaign.

Should a mayoral bid not materialise, or fail, it is more than feasible that Blair will then ask him to become the country's first football tsar - a commissioner-style figure linking government and the sport. No doubt Ms Hoey would have something to say about that. Indeed, she's just as likely as Banks to have a say about a lot of things. She isn't shy about inserting fleas into ears but in the end she will discover, as Banks did, that while sports ministers may have a lot of shout, they have very little clout.