Cauliflower-ears sponged and pressed, the fight game's glitterati assembled in force for this year's big bash, the annual British Boxing Board of Control gala awards in London last week. Prominent among the VIPs honouring the great and the good of the ring was the Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe.
 

Not that he's noted for any significant contribution to the Noble Art as a practitioner – goalkeeping is more his game for the Parliamentary football team – but his presence and active support of the sport confirmed that boxing is no longer the pariah of sports ,un-PC and frowned upon by the 'elf and safety Gestapo. 

 

The battered old trade is back in vogue - as well as in schools - with strong political approval in parliament not least for its contribution in helping keep kids off the streets by getting them into gyms where they can be taught to sportingly channel any tendency towards violence.
 

In some 40 years of covering the boxing and sports politics beats I have seen a whole procession of Sports Ministers come and go, a veritable cricket team in fact, plus a 12th man. The best have championed boxing.

The late and very much lamented Denis Howell, still unrivalled as the Muhammad Ali of our Sports Ministers, was very much a boxing buff, a ringside regular in the sixties and seventies when Board members and their guests always wore dinner jackets.

One of his many successors, Richard Caborn .also knows boxing, much of it learned from his good pal in Sheffield, Brendan Ingle, the man who trained Prince Naseem Hamed among other luminaries, in the skills of hit-and-hop it ringcraft.
 

Since he stepped down as Britain’s longest-serving Sports Minister (in a single spell that is – Lord Howell did the job  twice in a total of 11 years) he has washed up as president of the Amateur Boxing Association of England (ABAE), now a constituent body of the British Amateur Boxing Association (BABA) under another of his old mates, Derek Mapp.

We never saw much of Caborn at ringside though his appreciation of  the sport was evident. Both he and Sutcliffe fought hard to get it back on the agenda in schools.
 

Dick Caborn and I are old sparring partners. Last time we met - funnily enough at a boxing function - for no reason at all he publicly accused me of being "unenthusiastic" about London’s Olympic bid. How odd. Not only was it untrue, but uncalled for. Perhaps he was being prickly as he guessed he was about be jocked off the Board of England’s 2018 World Cup bid. Or maybe it was because I was occasionally critical of some of his policies on the less fashionable sport and his dismissive treatment the much-missed Panathlon to accommodate the politically-motivated UK School Games.

By and large marathon man Caborn wasn't a bad Sports Minister. Neither, in my view, was one of his Labour predecessors, Tony Banks, the spikiest and most outspoken of them all and always a joy to deal with. When I was sports editor of The Observer I once asked him whether, as a rival newspaper was suggesting, it was true that he was supporting a proposed move by a Welsh MP to ban head punches in boxing. He said he had not even read the proposal. So would he give me an on-the-record comment on the idea? "On the record?" he queried. "Yes".

 

"Effing bollocks!”
 

The late Banksy loved boxing, even though he declined an invitation  to speak at the Boxing Writers' Club dinner. The reason: it was a stag do, no women allowed. The Minister thought that a no-no, and as it happened, I agreed.

I would love to have been allowed to ask one of favourite Sports Ministers, Kate Hoey, to be my guest. Kate was a big boxing fan, too, particularly of the amateur game at club level.

 

A disciple of Denis Howell, she proved a terrific Minister with her devotion to grass roots sport, one of he best we've ever had but viciously stabbed in the back by Tony Blair after the Premier League's Sir Dave Richards, among others, blew in his ear because of her supposed antipathy towards the great god Footy.
 

The Sports Minister most associated with boxing was little Lord Moynihan then plain Colin Moynihan, a former bantamweight boxing Blue at Oxford and famously once barred by the ABA blazers for sparring with the pros at London's Thomas A'Becket gym.

 

He is now chairman of the British Olympic Association, of course, and at the last Commonwealth Games so keen was he to see the fisticuffs that he dashed straight from the airport, bags and all, and breathlessly dumped himself beside me in the media seats to savour the action at Melbourne's boxing arena. Like fellow sporting peer Lord Seb Coe (who has served as a  steward of the Board of Control), he is a boxing nut.
 

Moreover, he cheerfully endured having is own ears boxed by Margaret Thatcher on several occasions.
 

By comparison, the depressingly long line of Tory Sports Ministers who preceded and followed him under Thatcher and then John  Major were real down-the-bill journeymen: Eldon Griffiths,  Neil Macfarlane,  Hector Munro, Robert Key, Iain "Deep" Sproat, Richard Tracey and Robert Atkins. None, as I recall, having any particular affinity with boxing or boxing clever in the job themselves. And, lest we forget, the first-ever Sports Minister was Lord Hailsham, who rang a bell - though not a boxing one.
 

Luckily the man who, it seems, is likely to be the next Conservative Sports Minister, Hugh Robertson, is a a bit of aficionado too. He boxed at Sandhurst, and spoke punchily at this year's Boxing Writers’ Club dinner. A top man, Hugh, and if the Tories get in then sport and the Olympics will be in good hands.
 

But back to last boxing Oscars. Another notable politico present was Lord Tom Pendry, long-time Labour Shadow Minister for sport but surprisingly gazumped for the post when Blair appointed Tony Banks, Some say Pendry was the best Sports Minister we never had. The young Pendry was taught boxing by a Benedictine monk and, like Moynihan, became an Oxford Blue, and eventually a Services champion with the RAF. He has also served on the Boxing Board.

The gathering of the political bigwigs was a sure sign that boxing is back in the public eye, thanks to, among others, giant-killer David Haye, who smilingly signed some 300 autographs during the dinner, albeit somewhat shakily with his fractured right hand in plaster. That's the difference between fighters and footballers. They are the real pros.

There was a bonus for the amateurs, too when the world super-middleweight champion Carl Froch was named Boxer of the Year. Froch is trained by Robert McCracken. newly-appointed as performance director and head coach to the GB Olympic squad.
 

And while we're in boxing mode, just for fun here is my bunch of five, a ranking of sports ministers I have known and loved (well, some of them). In descending order: 1 - Denis Howell, 2 - Kate Hoey, 3- Colin Moynihan, 4 - Richard Caborn, 5 - Tony Banks.

I haven't included present incumbent Gerry Sutcliffe because, while he he is doing a decent job, he keeps a low profile and seems in need of  tips on how to raise it. Perhaps that's why he was chatting so earnestly to the Hayemaker.

 

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered 11 summer Olympics and scores of world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire, and is a former chairman of the Boxing Writers’ Club.