I remember visiting Dulwich just after the 2010 European elections. My old headmaster – David Emms – was there. He had long taken the view when I was at school that I was bloody-minded and difficult. He always saw that I was a wind-up merchant and wrote in my leavers’ report that the school would never be quite the same without me, in an 'upside-down sort of way’. But he also told me often that he had tremendous confidence in me. That day, visiting the school twenty-five years later, he told me he had voted for me in the 2010 European elections. That meant a lot.