Toby Young: Why do so many people want me to take on Andy Slaughter?

I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm.

‘You must do it,’ he said.

‘Do what?’

‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the rest of your life on the backbenches you’ll still have achieved far more than most of us in politics. He’s ghastly, that man, -ghastly.’

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This has been a common reaction to my disclosure in The Spectator that I’m thinking of embarking on a political career. Slaughter may have a majority of 3,549 but he’s far from universally loved.

‘I once commented that I would rather have my testes replaced with hornets’ nests than vote for Toby Young,’ wrote a commentator beneath last week’s column. ‘But the prospect of Andy Slaughter is even more unappealing.’ The Sunday Times suggested I might want to use that as a campaign slogan.

One of the reasons Slaughter is so disliked — not by everyone in the constituency, but by many — is that he’s so divisive. Like many of his Labour colleagues, his standard political tactic is to pit the haves against the have-nots. For instance, when I was in the process of setting up the West London Free School, he claimed in his constituency newsletter that my group was ‘ousting… a school for severely disabled children in its rush to open’.

That was being economical with the truth, to put it mildly. Yes, we eventually moved into a building that had been occupied by a school for special needs children, but we did that at the request of the school’s headmistress and chair of governors. We’d originally planned to move into another building called the Bryony Centre, but when the special needs school discovered this they asked if we could switch places, leaving us with their old building.