I still live in the same house, in London, in which I lived as a baby. I walk my five-year-old son every morning to the same school, on the same route that I took 43 years ago, holding my father’s hand. We sing Gilbert and Sullivan in the same bedroom. I am whacked with a sword in the same garden square in which I once whacked my father. And the picture of me in red velvet knickerbockers can be superimposed over the picture of my son in his Batman costume — each of us seated at the same corner of the same dining room, peering gloomily at the two candles on our birthday cake.
What will London look like when my son is the age I am now? His great grandmother was born in this same street in 1912 — they put straw down then so that the horses’ hooves wouldn’t wake the baby. By the time my son is my age, we will — on the government’s figures — have been buying only electric cars for 20 years. Will we still have red letter boxes then? London taxis? Will the Household Cavalry still be clumping down my street for their morning exercise? Will anyone have had the foresight to replant the plane trees? And will these symbols still feel as precious to his contemporaries as they feel to me?
Will he still be discussing Crossrail 2 (which was first planned out in the year that I was born)? And how will this week’s Brexit be remembered then? As a fierce ideological fight for freedom? Or a series of technocratic issues, shorn of their emotional power — questions not of what to do, but how. And will we have finally rewired our house?
For almost ten years as an MP I took the Tube five stops east to Westminster.
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