His personal website says that playing alongside Kenny Dalglish and later Peter Beardsley, he led Liverpool Football Club to glory after glory across the blistering 1980s. It even stresses that when compared to the dour Scot, it was he not the Glaswegian who season upon season ended up as the side’s top scorer.
With authorial flair he recounts a delicate chip against Jack Charlton’s Newcastle, a looping header which cut down the might of Spain one snowy night in Bilbao, and a left-foot right-foot brace on the road to the FA Cup in one particularly memorable Merseyside derby.
But new information has come to light, and for Paul Nuttall, the still recently elected leader of the UK Independence Party, it seems his fondest recollections have more than the air of total fiction. If Paul Nuttall has ever kicked a football in his life, perhaps at best it was only in the vicinity of Anfield.
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Nuttall has been forced to admit certain errors in the account of his sporting career which until last night was plastered all over the pages of his website. He now says that he scored a few less goals than he previously asserted, which in no way impinges upon his importance to the team as they embarked almost yearly upon the defence of their league title.
He confesses that at times he was reduced to playing ‘supersub’ to John Aldridge, but adds that the bulk of the errors rest on the shoulders of a UKIP press officer. However Mark Lawrenson, who did play for Liverpool in the 1980s, before belatedly attaining fame as a rotational Match of the Day pundit, says that Nuttall never wore the Liverpool shirt nor graced the fabled boot room, at least in so far as he can remember.
And indeed a closer look at the scrapbooks suggests that Nuttall never laced up any boots professionally – not even for lowly Tranmere. Supporters condemned what they described as his ‘blatant untruths’, only for Nuttall to cite a smear campaign, which he alleged had probably been organised by Labour-loving Manchester United.
Nuttall fiercely rebuked any suggestion that he has been lying. He said ‘I feel bloody angry, angrier than I’ve ever been and I thought I had seen everything in football’ – only forcing friends, journalists, and the odd prudent UKIP aide to once again remind him.
