It's official: Newcastle United's multi-millionaire manager Chris Hughton used to write for the UK version of the Daily Worker!

It emerged during yesterday's media conference that in his playing days at Tottenham Hotspur, Hughton used to pen a column for News Line, the daily newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).

To quote from their website, the WRP are the "British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, founded by Leon Trotsky. We are Marxists and fight for the principles founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky."

"You've been doing your homework," Hughton told The Times. "This was as a very young man and they had a football column in the paper. It was my first venture into journalism and probably my last. It was for a short period of time and it was actually through someone I knew who was associated with the paper. I had a friend who said 'do you want to have a column in a paper'.

"It was an opportunity at that stage and something different. It was quite some years ago, shall we say, but it's true. I wasn't politically involved with it, it was purely football. I was aware of what the paper was, but the bigger interest for me was, as a young man, it was quite nice to have my own column. It was nice at the time, but I don't think many people read it, though.

"Did I try to get Spurs to play in Red? Something like that."