A Journey Read Online Free Page B

word after word, agonising sentence after agonising sentence. I remember, too, how our income dropped overnight, some of his friends fell away, and the crushing recognition came that since his speech would never return to normal, his political career was over.
    My dad had been formative in my politics. Not because he taught me a vast amount about politics in the sense of instruction in its business (and him being on the opposite side of the political fence to me had given rise to some fairly heated debate, though much less frequently than might have been the case), but as a child I used to listen to his discussions with friends and absorb some of the arguments, hear the passion in their voices, and I obtained a little understanding of politics’ intricacies.
    I recall the very first time I met any politicians. Bizarrely, I think they were Michael Spicer, later a Tory MP, and even – but my memory may play me false – Patrick Jenkin, who went on to serve in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet. They came to dinner at our house in High Shincliffe in Durham, the reason, I dimly recall, because Michael – a young Tory prospect at the time – wanted to fight a hopeless seat to cut his teeth, and Dad had influence in the Durham seats.
    But none of that defined the principal impact on my political development. What Dad taught me above all else, and did so utterly unconsciously, was why people like him became Tories. He had been poor. He was working class. He aspired to be middle class. He worked hard, made it on his merits, and wanted his children to do even better than him. He thought – as did many others of his generation – that the logical outcome of this striving, born of this attitude, was to be a Tory. Indeed, it was part of the package. You made it; you were a Tory: two sides of the same coin. It became my political ambition to break that connection, and replace it with a different currency. You are compassionate; you care about those less fortunate than yourself; you believe in society as well as the individual. You can be Labour. You can be successful and care; ambitious and compassionate; a meritocrat and a progressive. Moreover, these are not alien sentiments in uneasy coexistence. They are entirely compatible ways of making sure progress happens; and they answer the realistic, not utopian, claims of human nature.
    So he affected me deeply, as in another way did my mum. She was as different from my dad as it is possible for two people living together to be. Dad was more like me: motivated, determined, with a hard-focused ambition that, I fear, translates fairly easily into selfishness for both of us. Mum, by contrast, was a decent, lovely, almost saintly woman. She was shy, even a little withdrawn in company. She supported Dad politically as his wife and companion, but, as she used to confide in me occasionally, she was not really a Tory. For some reason – maybe to do with her Irish background – she felt somehow excluded; and she thought that some of the more Tory friends had fallen away when Dad took ill.
    She died when I had just turned twenty-two. She had been ill with cancer of the thyroid. Looking back, it was clear she couldn’t survive, clear indeed that it was a minor miracle that she survived for the five years after she was first diagnosed.
    But the shock of it. There is nothing like losing a parent. I don’t mean it’s worse than losing a child. It isn’t. I don’t think anything can be. I mean that it affects you in a unique way, at least if it happens when you’re young. Mum’s death was shocking because I couldn’t contemplate it. As she deteriorated and I was in my last months at Oxford, working hard for the final exams, Dad and my brother Bill kept from me the truth of her condition. I came home at the end of June and Dad picked me up from the station. ‘Your mother’s really very ill,’ he said.
    ‘I know, but she’s not dying, is she?’ I said, stating the worst so that he would reassure