There were several aspects of Booth’s conduct, as described in PC Meadley’s statement, that probably helped secure the guilty verdict at East Riding Magistrates’ Court. Greeting the officer as “you Yorkshire bastard” can’t have helped. It was also alleged that he failed to intervene when his female companion struck Meadley, then – observing no improvement in his mood – put her arm around the constable and shouted, “To the woods!” And yet, with hindsight, Booth’s boast of an intimate connection with the highest level of government sounds not so much facetious as prescient: it’s hard to believe, more than eight years after his daughter moved in to Downing Street, how right that dead man was.
“I was not driving that night,” Booth tells me “I was asleep In the passenger seat With the engine turned off. Total: 378 games, 206 goals (total fees £29m).International career: 23 caps for Holland, 9 goals.. Once he’d arrested Tony Booth, on a dark road in North Yorkshire, Constable Keith Meadley asked for his address. [After Mourinho arrived] Peter Kenyon called my agent and just said, ‘OK, we’re going to let Jimmy go’, and that was it.”You suggest to him that there may have been a personality clash. “I don’t think I would have had a problem with Mourinho,” he retorts.

“When I speak to the [Chelsea] boys everybody says he is magnificent, even those not playing. So, he must be somebody special.”He adds: “I do feel at home here, and I’m part of something really nice. Obviously, there’s a difference between winning something like that [the championship] and playing in the Uefa Cup But I’ve learnt you can’t have everything in this world. I regard myself as fortunate in a different way, just by becoming a footballer.”Maybe to win all those things as well was a little bit too much for me. That’s how I live with it.”Life & Times: From Zaandam to the RiversideBorn: 27 March 1972, Paramaribo, Surinam.Vital stats: 5ft 10in, 13st 10lb.Position: striker.Club career: Telstar 1990-91; AZ Alkmaar 1991-92; Campomaiorense 1992-96, 31 games, 12 goals; Boavista 1996-97, 19, 20; Leeds 1997-99 (signed for £2m), 84, 42; Atletico Madrid 1999-2000 (£12m), 34, 24; Chelsea 2000-04 (£15m), 156, 88; FA Cup winners 2002, Premiership runners-up 2004, European Cup semi-finals 2004; Middlesbrough 2004-current (free), 54, 20; Uefa Cup quarter-finals 2005.

I think I could have still brought something to Chelsea.”Particularly with Didier Drogba not immediately assim-ilating himself into the Blues’ set-up? “What do I say? Drogba cost £24 million. In the first year, he didn’t score more than I did – and I was playing at Middlesbrough.” He shrugs “But I never spoke to [Jose] Mourinho. He admits that when Stamford Bridge was a cauldron of euphoria in May after that first title had been secured in 50 years, “I didn’t look” He pauses. “But I’m pleased for everyone I played with: Frank Lampard, John Terry [whom he maintains will be England's next captain], Eidur Gudjohnsen [his strike partner as well as his gambling accomplice during a period when Hasselbaink concedes he lost £100,000 at the tables] Maybe if I had been a few years younger I’d still be there.

I told Leeds, ‘If you are near to what Chelsea are offering I will stay’ Leeds said no. Am I a bad guy?”He could not have known that he was joining the right club – the one for which he still harbours great affection – at the wrong time. It hurt, and it was not right.”[Leeds chairman] Peter Ridsdale just wanted to throw mud at me to make himself look good Chelsea came in, made an offer to me. Obviously, he’s still learning a lot in the game because he’s still quite young.

Will he be the next England manager? Well, probably not, because he’s just signed a four-year deal here. But you never know.”Such are the vagaries of a sport in which Hasselbaink joined Chelsea when he had two years remaining on his Leeds contract, provoking accusations of disloyalty and greed “Leeds were the club who put me on the map as a footballer I acknowledge and appreciate that,” he says. “But things were said that were just not true, and they made me out to be greedy. ” ‘Am I fuck,’ I told George.”Yet Hasselbaink readily concedes: “In those early years, I needed someone to be hard on me George was, really hard. It was not always fair, but it made you realise that you had to play well every match And that’s why we did well as a team. It’s only afterwards, as you get older, and he’s gone, and you experience other managers, you knew George was right.”Which brings us tangentially to the Dutchman’s current manager, Steve McClaren. Is he resourceful enough to survive the perils of managing diverse England egos, should the biggest job of them all materialise? “The bigger the players, the tougher he will get,” says Hasselbaink “Yeah.