We should welcome Karl Henry joining the political debate, not kick him for being pro-Tory as Stan Collymore did

COMMENT: The QPR midfielder Karl Henry was accused of ‘forgetting where he came from’ after tweeting support for the Tories last week

Karl Henry of QPR signs autographs for fans (GETTY IMAGES)

“I’m OK for now. Don’t really want to get too heavily involved in politics at the minute,” Joey Barton replied last week when I asked him if he would be willing to discuss the subject, because of the territory we are now entering. Your heart sinks at moments like that but who could really blame him, considering what happened when he put his head above the parapet a few months ago?

Barton’s appearance on the BBC’s Question Time confounded the preconceptions about footballers and current affairs being mutually exclusive, when he talked intelligently about Ukip, the Chilcot Inquiry and Heathrow expansion. But Barton made an offensive, demeaning, stereotypical comment, telling Ukip’s MEP Louise Bours that voting Ukip was the equivalent of voting for one of “four really ugly girls”.

Bours replied with an offensive, stereotypical comment, telling the studio audience that Barton “fulfils the mission, doesn’t he, that footballers’ brains are in their feet” – and that was pretty much that.

David Dimbleby proceeded to demean Barton at virtually every opportunity. “Joey Barton, without bringing in four girls, what’s your view…” and “[Overweight] girls, I think that’s one for Joey Barton… you’re a health freak, aren’t you?”

Barton apologised for his comment and viewed Dimbleby’s pomposity philosophically. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?” he said. He was right. Subsequent reports accused the BBC of reaching a “new low” by inviting him on.

The sight of the 32-year-old being patronised by a clever posh bloke in his seventies made you despair of getting those individuals with the potential actually to engage and interest newer generations in politics seriously involved.

It was the same story this week when Karl Henry stepped into the fray. The QPR player declared on Twitter, as the televised interviews of David Cameron and Ed Miliband were taking place, that the “clear message” from Labour was: “If you do well for yourself, we’ll take it all from you and give it to those who haven’t. #Vote Conservative.”

To be fair about what then unfolded, if you decide to launch a bold political statement about the Conservative Party into that particularly vast and unnuanced repository, then you have to expect something back. But what Henry received from Stan Collymore on Twitter offered more depressing evidence of why we will find footballers so unwilling to join the debate.

In several bursts of 140 characters, Collymore accused Henry of being a greedy class traitor who “forgot where he came from” – a betrayal he himself could never be accused of. Collymore published a three-year-old feature article which he said proved the point.

Now, those who know Henry will tell you that he is not the most likely political crusader. My attempts to find out more have established that he was “great company” at a wedding once but he’s not generally one to broaden the conversation beyond expectations of an ordinary Wolverhampton lad.

But I venture to say that the 32-year-old’s view will actually have reflected those of the vast majority of footballers – because it is a fairly fundamental human reaction to resist the idea of paying more tax, especially when you are already paying a lot of it. It was refreshing to know that one of their number was watching the debates and willing to join the conversation.

Collymore chose not to join in what might have been a debate on the merits of the mansion tax, though he had a political vocabulary at his disposal, talking about “cohesive society” and “balanced wealth distribution” as the Twitter warfare between the two cranked up into the weekend.

But his assumption about what kind of politics must be attached to a council estate upbringing was almost as old as football’s maximum wage. The old certainties about finding Labour votes in Labour places have long gone. That’s precisely why the party has spent the last 15 years trying to broaden its appeal to the better off.

Henry said this, not in so many words. “Please tell me the views I should have, based on where I’m from? Is it, ‘council estate’ = ‘vote Labour’ by any chance?” he asked Collymore, hitting a nail on the head.

Henry’s support for the Conservatives had actually located a challenge that Labour still has, and must deal with in the next six weeks, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications, tells me: “I think we’ve still got a problem, an assumption ‘how can you call yourself Labour if you make a lot of money?’ And ‘I’ve got to vote Tory if I’m rich’.” Of course Labour doesn’t mean that.” Campbell, whose revealing new book Winners draws deeply on the lessons politics can learn from sport, wishes more players felt able to enter the conversation as Henry has done.

“A footballer is entitled to say what he thinks and it would be good if more felt they could do this, but people get monstered for it,” he says.

Witness that memorably succinct entry into last autumn’s Scottish independence debate from Andy Murray – “Let’s do this,” he tweeted – and the avalanche of criticism which followed. This left Murray reflecting: “Everyone should be allowed to do that [but] I wouldn’t do it again.”

Continental players don’t get this stick. An interview I once undertook with Vincent Kompany was reaching an end when he launched into 20 minutes’ talk about Democrat politics.

The level of the Henry/Collymore debate never got much beyond a Twitter punch-up and might yet degenerate into an actual one, judging by the way the commentator told the player: “I’ll see you at QPR.”

Ex-footballer turned pundit Stan Collymore (Getty Images)

Collymore professes that he, for one, possesses the soul of Ashmore Park, the Wolverhampton estate where Henry was raised. In which case he’ll know all about the kinds of stories I was hearing at a dinner in Manchester on Thursday, while Cameron, Miliband and Henry took the plunge, which suggested that the issues at stake in the weeks ahead go way beyond the wealth redistribution Collymore wants.

The testimony, told by the former magistrate and charity worker sitting beside me, was about besieged local councils so ravaged by cuts they are turning to foster parents to take the place of care homes. Experienced childcare providers losing contracts to inferior, cheaper operators.

For a footballer to talk about those things in the six weeks ahead would be something sublime. But for a footballer simply to take a risk and enter the political space is something quite special. Don’t kick him for doing it.