I WOULD be a strange animal in the journalistic jungle if I said I didn't enjoy politicians putting their foot in it.

They always make for good stories and we ran a cracker yesterday when shadow foreign secretary Francis Maude made a less-than-complimentary comment about the intelligence of people involved in football.

After being asked whether he thought it was a good idea for England to have a foreign manager, he said: "There are two many thickos in English football."

He had already admitted that he didn't really care, which leads to accusations that his comments were based on an ignorance of our national game.

But it is not hard to dismiss the comments of a politician that only regular viewers of Newsnight and ardent listeners of the Today programme will have heard of.

I would be more concerned for him if the appointment of Sven Goran Eriksson precipitated change of attitude in other positions of public life.

If the Tories win the next election, William Hague might find it tempting to bring in someone "with greater intelligence on the Continent" to run the foreign office.

Now that would be an interesting situation for us all to be in. But, seriously, we should not really concern ourselves with these opinions.

Glenn Hoddle would probably still be England manager if he had not commented on issues beyond his remit.

I would advise Mr Maude to do exactly the same because it's the faux pas that people tend to remember when they visit the ballot box.

A long pause and a bit of evasive indecision would have done just fine rather than insisting it was the right time to drop such a clanger.