Starmer up front

THE New Journal has started collecting for our Christmas hamper appeal. It’s been something we’ve been proud of over the years, because, a bit like the Finchley Road fire collection, it’s just a way of showing the community cares. It’s main aim is to try and make sure nobody feels forgotten when the majority of us are celebrating.

To literally kick things off, the boots are coming out for a football fund-raiser. The CNJ is still ailing from losing to Camden Labour’s bully-boy soccer team five years ago, when we were muscled out of a 10-4 scoreline by the sharp elbows of its local members. There was photographic evidence of this. We let it go, because it was all to raise money for the victims of the floods in Pakistan.

On Friday, the two teams meet again, with rumours circulating that Arsenal-supporting MP Keir Starmer will be deployed as their latest secret weapon. ‘He plays five-a-side every week and is pretty handy,’ a Labour councillor says, starting the goading. Another promises that the knight will be a ‘hat-trick hero’. We shall see.