Michael Portillo: My Teenage Poster Boy

written as part of a panel at The Guardian, 8 May 2017:

 ‘what political hero graced your bedroom walls as a child? Our writers confess’

Kate Maltby: Michael Portillo’s hopelessness appealed to me.

On 2 May 1997, I was 11. New Labour had just won a landslide victory. I went into primary school, and explained to all my friends why this would lead to the end of western civilisation. Then I went home to my bedroom and pinned up a newspaper photo of the new last hope of the liberal Tory: Michael Portillo, who had just lost his seat in Enfield Southgate. He blended in well, jostled against the posters of Queen Elizabeth I that littered the larger spaces.

We liberal Tories like to self-flagellate in public – it saves Iain Duncan Smith from doing it to us instead. I confess that in my more self-loathing hours, I wonder if my early Tory faith in meritocracy stemmed from an unshakeable faith that I was cleverer than all the other little girls at school. But I’d also grasped the principle that governments make poor managers, just as I knew that high tax stifles prosperity. The enemy, above all, was socialism; with it came the authoritarianism of the central-planners that had left my relatives in misery behind the Iron Curtain. To keep socialism completely at bay you needed a Tory government. In May 2017, that basic equation looks less absurd to adult voters than it did in 1997.