KATE HOEY, a keen Arsenal fan, was watching her team in a tense FA Cup final replay on TV on the evening of Thursday May 20 1993.

The game against Sheffield Wednesday at Wembley was deep into extra time when her phone rang.

It was the late Labour leader John Smith.

Earlier that evening Hoey had voted against the Maastricht Treaty being incorporated into British law against the Labour whip, which was to abstain.

As a junior member of Smith’s shadow front bench at the time, there were bound to be consequences.

But not only was she sacked, she also missed Andy Linighan’s last-minute winning goal.

“I remember saying: ‘Oh hang on, hang on, there’s a goal’,” she says, recalling an eventful evening for politics and sport between sipping mouthfuls of soup in Parliament’s canteen.

She had been joined in the No lobby by prominent figures of Labour’s left, including Dennis Skinner, Diane Abbott, Ken Livingstone and a certain Jeremy Corbyn.

In the debate on the Maastricht Treaty earlier that year, Corbyn had said the “imposition of a bankers’ Europe on the people of this continent will endanger the cause of socialism in the United Kingdom.”

Like Corbyn, she voted against Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community in 1975.

And her suspicions about the EU were solidified during her time as a Home Office minister when she represented Britain frequently at Brussels summits.

“That was when I really discovered the undemocratic nature and the whole cliquey-ness of the EU — it’s all about ‘you scratch my back here and I’ll scratch your back there’.”

Hoey has since swapped roles with Corbyn. She plays the backbench rebel while he bears responsibility for the party’s collective position to remain in the EU.

In a speech to Labour councillors earlier this month Corbyn said he will use the referendum to press for a “real social Europe.”

Although “disappointed” to lose a long-term ally (and fellow Arsenal fan), Hoey says she “understands” his position.

Equally, she reports that Corbyn told her recently that he had no problem with her involvement in the Leave campaign.

“The reality is that we are doing a service to the party,” she contends.

“What I believe we’re doing, in our small way, is flying a Labour flag in places that there wouldn’t otherwise be a Labour flag flying, which doesn’t do any harm.”

Hoey is one of half a dozen Labour MPs who launched the Labour Leave campaign last month with funding from JML entrepreneur John Mills.

They have been swamped with speaking invitations and Hoey has most recently visited Kettering, Manchester and Exeter.

Early experiences on the campaign trail have been encouraging for the Leave campaign but disheartening for Labour, she reports.

“The Labour Party is so out of touch with its supporters and ex-supporters,” she says.

“The thing that has struck me most, particularly in the north of England, is people coming up to me and saying: ‘I used to be a member but we’re now Ukip voters and it’s great that there’s people in the Labour Party saying what we think about the EU’.”

Hoey believes Labour’s enthusiasm for the EU is going to mean the referendum is remembered as a “missed opportunity” to re-engage with the party’s traditional working-class base.

“It still astonishes me that there’s such a silence within the official hierarchy of the Labour Party about the detrimental side of the EU.”

Margaret Beckett’s autopsy of Labour’s general election defeat contests that theory, however, concluding that “Ukip was in net terms more damaging to the Tories than to Labour.”

And critics of Labour’s most prominent Eurosceptic might suggest that the number of “kippers” she’s bumping into might reflect badly on her campaign bedfellows.

The Grassroots Out campaign with which she is now working is led by hard-right Tory MP Peter Bone.

I ask if she finds it difficult to campaign alongside people she has such ideological differences with?

“The reality is that if you really want to get out, every group has a slightly different perspective, and we can only win this referendum if we can all come together,” she says.

“I don’t think there’s a problem with that.”

Turning the question on its head, she adds: “The future aspiring leadership, people like Chuka Umunna, are going to be campaigning on the same platform as a Tory Prime Minister who has actually tried to destroy trade union rights through the Trade Union Bill.”

She brands the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign “very Establishment” and says: “I doubt if [chairman] Lord Rose could go and talk to a bunch of car workers and convince them that they should be voting to stay.”

However, Hoey levels the same criticism at the the Vote Leave campaign, from which Labour Leave disaffiliated last week after being sidelined by chief executive Dominic Cummings, a former adviser to Michael Gove.

“We felt very much that we were not there for any other reason than to get them the designation [as the official Leave campaign],” she says.

Her conviction is that the referendum represents “the people against the Establishment.”

The question facing voters is who represents “the people” and who represents “the Establishment?”

Hoey answers with a direct appeal to trade unionists, Labour members and Morning Star readers to “go with their instincts.”

Making her pitch, she says: “A social Europe may have been the intention of some well-minded, good-willed people.

“But look at what’s happened in Greece and other countries that have had economic austerity thrust upon them.

“That is never going to be changed, influenced or reformed while you have a totally unelected Commission and no structure that allows for genuine meaningful change and no proper vetos for individual countries.”

On that flourish, Hoey finishes her soup and practically sprints off towards the Commons.

There’s a debate on the timing of the EU referendum taking place, but she’s got a date with the Fire Brigades Union parliamentary group.