Ever since I was a schoolboy and first became aware of politics, I always felt I could sleep soundly in the knowledge that the prime ministers I counted in and counted out – irrespective of whether the rosettes they wore were red or blue – did not wish to actively damage our country or indeed my own life chances.
Up until now, I’ve been more than happy to leave politics to the politicians, but the election during the summer of Boris Johnson by Tory party members – an infinitesimal 0.13 per cent of the population – was the final straw for me. I awake each morning now with a sense of dread about what new humiliation is to be visited upon our country and at what additional cost to us all.
Above all, I feel profound guilt that the generation now in school is being denied something that mine could always count on – a government that fundamentally isn’t in the business of doing harm – and that’s why I am on my pilgrimage to Canterbury.
I shall be standing in that constituency in the general election for the Liberal Democrats, the only major party in England with a leader who has been consistently opposed to Brexit, and, while I will be the Sea biscuit candidate, some way behind the favourites, I have faith that I will win.
I am up against two ladies: Anna Firth, an avowed Tory Brexiteer, who chaired Vote Leave’s Women for Britain in the referendum campaign, and the incumbent MP, Rosie Duffield, an amiable and decent lady who follows me on Twitter, but nevertheless, as a Labour Remainer in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, a political oxymoron. The constituency, I might add, voted 52.8 per cent Remain.
I will be honest and admit that in the last general election I voted Labour because I genuinely believed that friends like David Lammy and others in his party would prevail upon Corbyn to do what was right in relation to Brexit. I was wrong. Three and a half years on, my patience with the party is exhausted: none of us can doubt any more that its leader is an avowed Brextremist.
“It’s my hopes for a brighter future for the young that have driven me into politics and I promise them that I will keep their concerns uppermost in my mind”.
Yes, Labour is for a further referendum on Brexit, but it still appears to believe it can come up with a “jobs first Brexit,” and it would presumably be that it would champion if it were to become the party of government. So its position on this defining issue in this election is once again constructively ambiguous.
The issues in the constituency I will be contesting are not unlike those anywhere else in the country – health care provision, crime, development, employment, homelessness, education and the environment uppermost among them – but on not one of these issues could I look a single constituent in the face if I didn’t have a leader who was as unambiguously hostile to Brexit as I am.
All these problems need time and money to fix and we simply can’t afford them while we indulge in a hobby quite as costly and all-consuming as Brexit. What is painfully clear is that the Tory and Labour manifestos are going to be short-circuited by Brexit: their old unique selling points – as, respectively, the parties of business and working people – have been rendered meaningless by this policy.
This whole general election will be a test of traditional allegiances in the way that none has before, but it will also be for me a deeply personal endeavour. People sometimes ask me why, from the beginning, was I so resolutely opposed to the idea of leaving the European Union, and I always reply that I happened to know most of the individuals driving it. Johnson was for 12 years a colleague of mine on the Daily Telegraph, and, if ever there was a man who didn’t grasp that in politics – unlike in journalism – you have to take responsibility for your rhetoric, this was the one.
Johnson always warped, too, the ideal that journalists should be on the side of the poorest in our society against the richest. Until recently, he trousered £270,000 a year from the fanatically pro-Brexit Telegraph owners Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, while taking £80,000 “pocket money” from the taxpayer as a backbench MP. One man, two governors and there was never the slightest doubt in my mind which one took priority.
“Canterbury deserves the opportunity to select a candidate who is not only unambiguously opposed to Brexit, but also has a leader of exactly the same mind”.
In journalism, you can of course blag it and set yourself up as an expert on anything when you haven’t even began to really master the detail. You can’t do that in government. You can’t count on electors to forget – as elderly Telegraph readers are apt to do – what you said or wrote yesterday. I think not just of Johnson’s pledge of £350 million a week extra for the NHS, but also – and it’s there in black and white if you check Hansard for July 11 2017 – his unambiguous assertion that there is “no plan for a no-deal because we’re going to get a great deal”.
This is a time of reckoning. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows the tectonic plates of our politics are shifting. The 92,153 Tory members who voted Johnson into the premiership seem a pretty desultory rabble when compared with the six million who signed a petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked and for us to remain in the EU.
In common with all the other drivers of Brexit, Johnson is an individual with a humongous ego who’s out for himself, and so is it any wonder he’s now already fallen out so badly with Nigel Farage (and the Telegraph) and still none of them can agree on what Brexit actually means?
A Lib Dem MP for Canterbury would have seemed a pretty far-fetched notion not so long ago, but then so would the thought of Lord Heseltine and the former Labour Home Secretary John Reid – not to mention Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell and, I suspect, Betty Boothroyd – all voting for my party in the EU elections in which we beat both the two “main” parties.
I have of course made a career since June 23 2016 of moaning about Brexit in my journalism. It takes an act of will to actually stand up and do something about it. This much I have learnt already: it is a lot easier to be the critic than it is to be the criticised.
Still, I think Canterbury deserves the opportunity to select a candidate who is not only unambiguously opposed to Brexit, but also has a leader of exactly the same mind. Inevitably, a lot of Momentum members locally are now going online presuming to tell the constituency what it wants the election result to be. At the moment, I am still finding out. Hearteningly, the first voter I met out canvassing – pictured here – not only said he’d vote for me, but said he wanted one day to be a Lib Dem candidate, too.
I am finding that young people in particular are not just opposed to Brexit, but incandescent about it. My generation has let them down and badly. They know that there are other things in life eminently more important and not least climate change. It’s my hopes for a brighter future for the young that have driven me into politics and I promise them that I will keep their concerns uppermost in my mind.
I am new to this, but I will try to run a decent, principled and pragmatic campaign. I will recognise, above all things, that this is about something a lot more important than me, and, if it doesn’t work out, there are other things I can do and enjoy. I might add, too, I didn’t go into politics to lumber a constituency I’ve already come to love with an unrepentant, hard line Brextremist like my appalling Tory opponent. She clearly hasn’t had a chance to get to know her leader nearly as well as I have.
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Tim Walker left the Daily Telegraph after 12 years to work first for the Daily Mirror – writing two election diaries – and now he’s on The New European. He has also advised Gina Miller on media strategy – who defeated both the May and Johnson governments in the Supreme Court in cases that turned on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty – and he has helped, too, the climate change think tank E3G. Twitter: @ThatTimWalker
