One evening in the mid-1990s Gordon Brown held a reception in the houses of parliament for Raith Rovers, the  little Scottish football club he supports. Raith were celebrating victory in the Scottish League Cup, the only prize in their history.

One of the guests was a writer, a Raith fan who had been to school with Brown in the town of Kirkcaldy. At one point Brown came up to him and said something like, “Why don’t you and I buy Raith and turn them around?”