I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There are parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane dip away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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What did we expect from him? He’s a footballer, not a saint. He’s not a role model for how we expect our kids to behave either. I particularly take exception to how footballers are allowed to spit on the pitch live on TV. That’s disgusting. But I wouldn’t accept that a child of mine – or a child near me – could spit with impunity because he’s seen it on-field, on telly. Better to tell kids that extraordinary people can get away with dreadful stuff, and maybe when they grow and get to be extraordinary, they can too. But not yet, thank you, not on my watch. (Better keep that rap for your own kids: dishing out advice in public needs to be carefully-judged.)

Anyhoo. As Max Clifford, whose understanding of sporting reputations is second to none, said yesterday on BBC Breakfast TV, true football fans – that’s millions and millions of Brits – are not bothered by who or how many Terry allegedly bedded.

Sponsors don’t care much either. If Terry’s sponsors wanted to avoid all hint of scandal they would not have sponsored any footballers in the first place. No more than Kate Moss’s sponsors were surprised when their heroin-chic-looking model was exposed as being an authentic serial coke abuser. The sad truth was that the suspicion that she was debauched was what made her attractive in the first place.

However, sponsorship and humbug are inseparable. Kate Moss first lost and then got back her sponsorship deals. Today she earns more than ever from them. I predict that Tiger Woods will do the same – when he gets out of sex-rehab – and so will John Terry.

Even the great West Ham and England legend Bobby Moore got himself arrested in Bogota, Colombia, for stealing a bracelet six days before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Moore was also a notorious late night boozer, a womaniser (behind his wife’s back) and he was rumoured to have been involved in some dodgy business deals. So what? He’s still Britain’s most famous, most revered footballing hero.

But, and it’s quite a big But. Everyone in the public needs to remember that whilst views on private morality have changed a bit, expectations of honesty have changed a lot. The modern trick seems to be that you do not have to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. You can tell people to mind their own business, for a start. You can stay schtumm, if you do it prettily or wryly, or whatever. But avoid lying. There was a time when people understood hyprocrisy and though they probably still do, really, you’re fair game if you’re caught out.

So here’re a few rules that might come in useful to stars and their PRs managing similar risks to John Terry and the late Booby Moore:

• Don’t let PRs sell the politically-correct narrative of your personal life.

• Don’t use personal virtues as a shield to promote your professional ones.

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

• Avoid the temptation to indulge in moral outbursts on any topic.

• Don’t bring your personal life to work or include it in your PR.

• Those who live by the sword die by it

• Don’t lecture anyone (especially not your staff or your adoring fans) about personal morality.

• Always assume that everything always gets into the media in the end.

• The public love sinners and loathe saints.

Once the story’s out – shrug, smile and tell people to mind their own business (and grovel in rehab while the heat’s on if need be).

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The two Davids are every bit as respectable as Roman Abramovich, Ken Bates or the Glazer family and any other football club owners you could care to mention.

Besides, to be frank, football’s not a squeaky-clean, stodgy, middle-class, anally retentive, joined-up-writing kind of a game. Maybe you’ve noticed? Indeed, the more the world goes in for the tick-box respectability of litigation-averse no-school-trip hi-viz safety-first outdoor-heating smoking dens, the more a large chunk of humanity seeks out the wild-side.

Football fans – from all backgrounds – secretly want a break from the goody-goody new world.

So, for example, England fans dreaming of World Cup glory don’t care what Wayne Rooney did with 45 quid and a 48-year-old grandmother of 16 in a Liverpool brothel.

West Ham fans are not especially impressed by the fact that both our Davids are local boys made good, or that there would hardly be a man or woman on the all-seating stands who hasn’t helped plump up the bank balances of the new owners. We don’t care that they are former East End barrow boys and life-long Hammers’ fans. No more than I was impressed when hapless local boy, and my former school dinner monitor, Glenn Roeder, was once made manager of our team.

We don’t care a monkey’s fart either that one of the Davids once played for our youth team.

No, we want their cash and their commitment to our club. That’s it and it’s a lot. As David Sullivan said today: “It makes no commercial sense to buy this club.” Not with its £110 million’s worth of debt.

Football is a high risk investment. Just like newspaper publishing it attracts adrenalin-driven buccaneers with big egos. They invest for the kudos, influence and sense of power that comes from owning something hundreds of thousands of others are crazy about and which pits their wits and skills against similar titans of their ilk.

Owning a football club is a bit like owning a red Ferrari, fur coat or a yacht. It says you’ve arrived and are enjoying life’s thrills and spills. Just when you’re having to live behind security grilles you can spend Saturday afternoons as a sort of Pleb’s Caesar hoovering up the roar of the crowd and sort of loved by it.

The problem with our last owner was that he was an Icelandic billionaire with a penchant for spending other people’s money in his day job as a banker and at West Ham United. The bad news today is that CB Holding, whose main shareholder is troubled Icelandic bank Straumur, still owns 50% of the club, but the good news is that they’ve relinquished control to the two Davids.

So it’s good riddance to bankrupt stupidity and hello to new ambition from the two nutters bred in London’s East End smog. (Ah, the good-old, bad-old days of real pollution you could stub a toe on.)

Taking what strikes me as a sensible approach, they plan to attract more rich investors – and fans – to share their financial risk. Setting out their stall, here’s what David Sullivan said today on WHUFC.com:

“Our first priority has to be securing the Premier League status of West Ham. I believe the players at this club have shown great commitment in trying circumstances and the new board and I will get behind them in every way we can.

“We will also look to bring in new players to supplement the squad where needed once we have met with the manager.”

And here’s what he told the BBC:

“We have short-term and long-term goals. In the short term, we want to stay in the Premier League and in the long term we would like to be challenging for the top four and the Champions League.”

Come On You Irons!

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When my blood’s up, I have to remind myself to be pro-British and not anti-German. Germany’s at least as nice a place as Switzerland or my own beloved England. Indeed, after reading English news of late, Continental virtues (Swiss, German or any other) can seem quite worthwhile.

Anyway, I’m richly varied. I once fell into the folly of being far left. My reasoning of thirty years ago flooded back to me after seeing news of England’s shame in the form of the BNP – neatly put in perspective by David Aaronovitch. I’m from Dagenham and Romford, white heartland of NF and BNP lumpens. I opposed them in my youth when I used to push fruit & veg barrows on Wentworth Street and Romford markets. My mates were a mixed crowd, and a target of hate. I still despise neo-fascists today. And I do mean “despise”: a sort of visceral loathing that isn’t polite.

And there’s the point: I want to stop the BNP, but my hating them doesn’t help me or hurt them. Time to move on.

But I couldn’t resist sharing this Ian Dury classic. It’s a white and indigenous ditty, by chance. It’s somehow the best of patriotism without the worst. The words and humour of Ian Dury’s Blockheads helped define the spirit of my East End gang. While we were all in Victoria Park on 30th April 1978 to hear Tom Robinson, The Clash, Steel Pulse and others say no to racism, Ian Dury was our local hero, not them. So, for all my Dagenham-mates against the BNP, here goes Ian Dury:

There are jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
And every jewel shines a thousand ways

Frankie Howerd, Noël Coward and garden gnomes
Frankie Vaughan, Kenneth Horne, Sherlock Holmes
Monty, Biggles and Old King Cole
In the pink or on the dole
Oliver Twist and Long John Silver
Captain Cook and Nelly Dean
Enid Blyton, Gilbert Harding
Malcolm Sargeant, Graham Greene (Graham Greene)

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Nice bit of kipper and Jack the Ripper and Upton Park
Gracie, Cilla, Maxie Miller, Petula Clark
Winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips
Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps
Lady Chatterley, Muffin the Mule
Winston Churchill, Robin Hood
Beatrix Potter, Baden-Powell
Beecham’s powders, Yorkshire pud (Yorkshire pud)

Billy Bunter, Jane Austen
Ray Ellington, George Formby
Billy Fury, Little Titch
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Somerset Maugham, top of the form and the Boys’ Brigade (England’s glory)
Mortimer Wheeler, Christine Keeler and the Board of Trade (England’s glory)
Henry Cooper, Mighty Strangler, England’s labour (England’s glory)
Standard Vanguard, spotted dick, England’s workers (England’s glory)

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“I know the value of my players and I’m not worried at all. My concern is that they don’t get too frustrated. I totally believe in them and I have so much faith in their qualities for us. I am sure this spell is going to be over soon.”

I hope he’s right. But the manager’s perception, like our dreams, often fades and dies over the course of 90 minutes’ play. But when West Ham’s fortunes turn, you’ll read about them bubbling here.

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