Like most people of my age – I’m 66 – I grew up in a time when politics was a tribal thing, like supporting a football team. My earliest political memory concerned a local election which took place in the 1960s in my working-class neighbourhood of Bristol South. At break time, there was a group of rough boys swaggering around the playground, grabbing other boys and asking bluntly ‘Sam or Doctor?’ These were, respectively, the Labour and Conservative local election candidates; if you said ‘Sam’ you were released but if you said ‘Doctor’ you were shoved roughly between the boys and proffered a punch for your uppity ways.

There’s so much about Reform I like – and so much about the Tories I loathe

There’s so much about Reform I like – and so much about the Tories I loathe

Growing up in such an environment, was it any wonder that, as late as 2013, Toby Young in this magazine was puzzled that, knowing me to be a contrarian ‘I can’t persuade her to throw in her lot with Nigel Farage. ‘I’ve always voted Labour and I always will,’ she says sadly. ‘I’ve got to have one stupid, docile, bovine part of me and that’s the part that votes Labour.’’

I don’t recognise that person now, thank goodness. In 2019, I voted Conservative for the first time, for Boris, and because of Brexit. The morning after, not only did I feel no shame, but I didn’t grow horns, as my father implied might most likely happen if I voted anything but Labour. Since then, with the joyous fall of the Red Wall and in common with millions of my equally amazed compatriots, I’ve gloried in the fact that we don’t have to be counted, corralled and branded like cattle by the two main parties – with the odd rogue bovine straying off to the equally smug and useless Lib-Dems. Thanks largely to the efforts of the aforementioned Nigel Farage, we’re free to choose.

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