Help! I’ve started to care about politics

Once upon a time, I didn’t really care about politics. Not viscerally. Growing up in a political family, I suppose, you go one of two ways. You know those kids you’ll sometimes see being paraded around by political parents in facepaint and rosettes, waving from shoulders as though born into a cult? I wasn’t like that. More the opposite. Politics was always nearby, and sometimes even interesting, but it was nothing to do with me. Devotees often made me think of those people who support a football team and refer to it as ‘we’. Get over yourself, I always thought. You’re just a spectator.

If you wanted to detect a degree of entitlement in this, I suppose you’d be entitled to. Perhaps it’s a bit like that old German joke about the child who is mute until he is five, to the extent that his parents wonder if he’s been hit on the head.