Can I be cancelled twice?

One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I would be one of 15 non-executive directors. But because it was a public appointment it would be made by the prime minister, which meant I was a political target. When it was announced on 1 January 2018, the offence archaeologists went to work, sifting through everything I’d said or written dating back 30 years in the hope of finding evidence that I wasn’t a suitable person to take up the role. The idea was to force me out, embarrass Theresa May and end my career into the bargain.

Needless to say, within hours they had dug up a Tutankhamun Tomb’s-worth of ‘offensive’ material and eight days later I resigned. Shortly afterwards, I had to step down from four other positions, including my full-time job as head of the New Schools Network, a free schools charity. I lost a stone in weight, my income was cut in half and I became a social pariah. The hardest blow was having to sever all links with the four schools that I’d helped to set up, the product of ten years of voluntary work and my proudest achievement.

So when Kemi Badenoch put my name forward for a peerage, I felt a sense of redemption but also fear that history would repeat itself. What if someone leaked the fact that I’d been nominated before the Cabinet Office or the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC) had had a chance to consider it? Would the Labour party press office whip up a Twitter storm in the hope of forcing me to pull out? In the weeks leading up to Friday 20 December, when it was officially announced, I checked the papers every day, terrified the story would leak.