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. With this background, I knew that I would widely be seen as a traitor, while continuation in my job was obviously impossible. The day before the Spectator piece appeared, I had handed in my resignation to my boss, a decent Labour front-bencher called Doug Henderson, who showed understandable bewilderment and annoyance at my move.
Yet that was nothing compared with the tidal wave of fury which was about to be unleashed against me once news of the article spread. That bleak Thursday morning I boarded a bus in Islington bound for central London, with my coat collar turned up and a wide-brimmed hat turned down in a fearful attempt to avoid recognition by any enraged former colleagues. I went to the offices of The Spectator, where I met the editor Dominic Lawson, who generously took me for a celebratory lunch.
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