The British public is about to make a big mistake

On the weekend of 25 April 2015 I started to believe that the party I supported might not win an impending general election. I’m used to that. But I started to believe, too, that my fellow citizens might be about to make a stupid and unfathomable mistake.

I’m not used to that at all. It has come as an awful shock.

For the first time in my life I have understood how it must have felt to be a convinced socialist in Britain these past 36 years since 1979: to live in and love a country whose people had got it completely wrong. ‘Well, diddums,’ I can hear left-wing friends reply: ‘Welcome to our world.’

In the general election of 1979, as a parliamentary candidate, I knew the voters would return me and believed they would return a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. Obviously, because the country was in a mess and it was Labour governments’ fault. The common sense of the British people (I thought) would prevail.

And it did. It did again in 1983, and in 1987, though by then I sensed that Mrs T. was going a bit off the rails and could understand why not everyone (including some of our own party) felt fully on board. Then came John Major, whom I trusted and admired, so in 1992 when it looked like we were losing I did wonder about the wisdom of the British crowd. But given the last Thatcher years, the poll tax and all that, I would not have blamed my countrymen for taking a gamble with Labour. They didn’t. I felt proud.

The years of embarrassment that followed, as the party I supported humiliated a brave and well-judged Prime Minister, shook my confidence not in the electorate but in my own party.