My life as a political spouse

When I was a teenage Tory activist in the mid-1990s, I hoped one day I’d be part of a leadership election campaign team. The energy and the intrigue looked so exciting. Eventually, I did end up right in the thick of it – but as a political spouse. These races have changed a lot since then. Michael Portillo’s plan to run against John Major was rumbled when his allies were found to have installed dozens of phone lines in a campaign headquarters: that was how you did it back in the 1990s. Now, it’s all done in WhatsApp groups. Kemi and I joke about what we would have made of each other then. I’m glad we didn’t meet: I’m not sure we have would have appreciated each other’s qualities at that time.

We met through the Conservative party more than a decade later, when she was the parliamentary candidate in a safe Labour seat. It was not an auspicious start; there was a degree of mutual suspicion. She was the upstart insurgent, I was the besuited Tory ex-public schoolboy. But she was desperate for activists and made me her campaign manager. We searched Brixton for Conservative voters and didn’t find many. But we did spend a lot of time together. I recall one of my desperate chat-up lines: I told her she possessed the ‘greatest political mind of her generation’. After the last couple of weeks, that doesn’t seem quite so silly.

I grew up in the one-nation tradition of the Tory party, and with hindsight was a ‘wet’ on pretty much everything. I even campaigned for Remain when Kemi backed Brexit. My greatest electoral victory was becoming a councillor in Merton, south London. I stood for parliament in Northern Ireland as the candidate for Foyle in 2015 and outperformed expectations when I won a whole 132 votes.