A traitor’s tale

Leaving the Labour party is uniquely traumatic, as Luke Bozier has just discovered – and I know all too well

Even now, exactly 17 years later, I can still remember the sense of anxiety gripping me on that fateful morning. The storm was about to break. I had taken a step that would irrevocably change my life. It was a damp, drizzly Thursday in late January 1995 and the latest edition of The Spectator had just come out, carrying an explosive article by me in which I savaged Labour’s record in local government and warned that the same addiction to waste, bureaucracy and politically correct ideology would be followed at a national level if Tony Blair gained power at the next election.

This was the first piece I had ever had published. What made it so incendiary was that, at the time, I was not only a Labour researcher at Westminster, but also a party activist in Islington.