Matt Le Tissier comes out as a supporter of Big Farmer

Remember Rishi Sunak? Fans of Southampton FC barely do – the former prime minister having been hardly seen at their stadium this season despite saying before the election: “This is my home and my football team has got promoted to the Premier League. So I intend to spend many more happy occasions at St Mary’s watching them.”

That remark was made when Sunak was busy denying that he would leave the country for his penthouse in California if the Tories lost to Keir Starmer. Since then he has taken up a visiting fellowship at the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in the golden state.

Perhaps his absences are for the best – no doubt inspired by Sunak’s election campaign, the Saints have won at home only once in the league this season and are nailed-on for relegation (and in further evidence of the former PM’s reverse Midas touch, he was in attendance for the England men’s cricket team’s historic 150-run T20 mauling in India at the weekend).

But another political heavyweight has been very much in evidence at St Mary’s: the mercurial midfielder turned ranting conspiracy theorist Matt Le Tissier, who turned up outside the ground late last month accompanied by 14 tractors in a protest against Labour’s inheritance tax changes. This will have come as a shock to many of Covid sceptic Le Tiss’s supporters who after seeing him claim that PCR tests were “entirely responsible for elevating a flu bug into a pandemic” and ventilators “caused harm to patients”, will have thought he was an opponent of Big Farmer.