Hugo Rifkind: Yes, I’m apathetic about politics. But isn’t Russell Brand?

Since I was a child, pretty much everybody I have ever met has asked me if I want to be a politician. The answer has always been no. Once, at university, I dimly remember giving this answer with so much vigour and conviction that I was escorted from the room, and the guy I’d given it to — an almost perfect stranger — came back to find me the next day, to apologise for asking in the first place. Even these days, the phrase ‘follow in your father’s footsteps’ drifting across the table at a dinner party can cause my wife to shoot me a warning look. My point here being, it’s never been ‘maybe’.

Eventually, I suppose, the question will switch to the past tense, and people will ask whether I never wanted to be a politician, and I will feel old. But not, I think, regretful. The question irritates me for a bunch of reasons, but chief among them is the presumption it makes about my politics. Because what they expect, of course, is not only that I might want to be an MP, but also that I’d necessarily want to be a Conservative one.

This is annoying on a personal level — especially these days, when my general un-Conservativeness is hardly something I keep bottled up — but also, at the risk of sounding pompous, on a philosophical level, too. I’m similarly annoyed when those on the left start shouting about their familial credentials — parents on picket lines, grandparents founding members of institutionally angry working men’s organisations in Doncaster, etc — because I simply don’t grasp what difference it ought to make. Bluntly, if your politics are not the outcome of your own independent thought process, I don’t particularly see why they should be of any interest to me.