As a journalist I got used to asking questions. As an apprentice politician I’ve had to get used to answering them. And that has meant learning all over again that the simplest questions to ask are the trickiest to answer.
Most of my acquaintances have been extraordinarily encouraging about my decision to relinquish a journalistic career at the Times in the hope of being elected as the MP for Surrey Heath. But the father of one friend was perplexed. Sufficiently so to ask the question I least expected.
It wasn’t ‘Why have you done it?’ He could quite understand why someone would want to give up the frustrations of shouting on the sidelines and see if they could make any difference on the pitch. What he couldn’t understand was why I’d decided to stand as a Conservative.
Why indeed? I had thought it didn’t need explaining. He knew me well enough to know that I’d always been right-wing, didn’t he? He knew I was an Atlanticist who in a fight between George Bush and a tax-raising, terror-appeasing bundle of liberal prevarications was backing Bush all the way.
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