Who’s sabotaging my Leave campaign?

I’ve never been a great believer in karma. After all, in the absence of some kind of cosmic enforcer of karmic justice what guarantee is there that good deeds will be rewarded or bad deeds punished? Let’s not forget that Joseph Stalin was responsible for between 34 and 49 million deaths, depending on whose estimate you accept, yet died of natural causes in his own bed at the age of 73. Karma? What karma?

But events of the past fortnight have caused me to revise my opinion. It’s all to do with the massive Vote Leave billboard outside my house in Acton, and an incident that occurred 42 years ago during the October 1974 general election.

It’s rather shaming to admit, but back then I was a Labour party supporter. I was only a boy and firmly under the influence of my parents, who were both staunch socialists, but that’s hardly an excuse for what’s coming next. As a ten-year-old Labour ‘activist’ I took it upon myself to tear down a poster of our local MP outside the Conservative party’s HQ in Highgate.

A blue rinse immediately leapt out of the door, caught me by the scruff of the neck and threatened to call the police. Being a typical Labour supporter, I burst into tears and threw myself on her mercy, whereupon she ordered me to cough up my address and then frogmarched me to my house. She told my mother about this act of ‘mindless vandalism’, rightly dismissing my claim that it was a ‘political protest’, and my mother stopped my pocket money for a week.

Fast forward to the beginning of the EU referendum campaign and the delivery of my Brexit billboard. I must have ticked the wrong box on the Vote Leave website, because all I wanted was a simple placard.