I’ll vote Lib Dem – but I can’t join them

I don’t believe that before last week I’ve ever quit any organisation on an issue of principle. I tend to find people tiresome who make a song and dance about doing so. I never thought that one day I’d be ‘making an exhibition of myself’ (as my father used to say) and certainly not so late in my life.

But in my Times column on Saturday that’s what I did. And it’s futile to deny I was attention-seeking. Of course I was. A columnist earns his bread by drawing attention to himself and his opinions. Quitting the party you joined 50 years ago is just a rather theatrical way of doing that.

But I haven’t enjoyed the attention much. A sadness has hung over me since: the sadness, really, of parting from an old friend. The Conservative party owes me a little, I suppose, for doing my best to make the Tory case over 30-odd years in journalism, speaking at endless fundraising dinners for scores of party colleagues old and new, delivering leaflets and canvassing for friends, and mediating a dozen or more parliamentary candidate selections… but it owes me almost nothing for my seven years as a Conservative MP: years in which I made no impact beyond working hard for my constituency of West Derbyshire.