‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour, I’m an MP’

When I came to play back the recording of my recent interview with Bob Marshall-Andrews, the serially rebellious Labour MP for Medway, for a second or two my blood ran cold. As I remembered it, while I’d been drawing him we’d had a wide-ranging conversation about Blair, Brown, socialism, globalisation, MPs’ allowances, the constitution, the judiciary, the media and society at large. But instead of all that my tape started halfway through a long, rambling and very funny anecdote about a hotel where Marshall-Andrews had once stayed in Wales. My contributions, meanwhile, seemed to consist solely of monosyllabic grunts, occasional barks of laughter and increasingly frequent protestations that I must be getting home as I was feeling very ‘tired’.

As it happens I quickly established that I’d accessed the wrong file on my whizzy new digital dictaphone, and luckily the other file was still intact. More worryingly, I realised I must have turned the damned thing back on once we’d repaired from the Gay Hussar, where I’d drawn Bob over lunch, to the House of Commons terrace via the Garrick Club.