FIRST of all, a word of thanks to all those people who have buttonholed or phoned me over the past seven days suggesting last week’s column was the launch of my campaign to become an MP.

Good laughs are rare these days, so going home with a smile on my face was a real treat. But you’re wrong. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me to Westminster.

There’s a bit of the conspiracy theorist in us all, I suppose. Everyone has to have an agenda, a motive. What’s yours?

It’s a nasty by-product of the spin culture which has taken over our political institutions, a process whereby a perfectly sensible person writes down what someone has said and is led aside by a third party who tells them: “Well actually the point he intended to make is…”

Politics being what it is, the point is usually that some colleague is past it, washedup, and I want their job and don’t forget this is “off the record”. Such is the standard of political dialogue these days.

It’s rare to hear a politician say or write what he or she actually believes – like I did last week. That’s because they are all so carefully managed, but also because of a fear of saying something wrong, or more accurately what people don’t want to hear.

Fear runs through modern politics.

Labour is afraid of being seen as the party of welfare. The Conservatives are afraid of being outflanked on Europe by UKIP. Everyone is afraid of being thought soft on crime.

It leads to everyone crowding for comfort on the safe middle ground and fosters a super-cautious attitude to public opinion.

The court of public opinion is the highest I know, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t guilty of the odd miscarriage of justice. We need politicians who can lead as well as listen, take risks and when they think it’s the right thing to do, go against the flow.

“You’re out of touch” was another charge levelled at me last week, which really means I should agree with the masses, but what if I think the masses are wrong on a particular subject? What’s the point in only telling people what they want to hear? That’s pretty disrespectful in my book.

Not being in tune with public opinion is of course the other great modern sin and playing up to it has led our leaders down some strange paths, from demanding the release of jailed soap opera characters to commenting on ongoing court cases. We should demand better of them.

Politicians say they are no good to anyone if they are not elected. They are not much good if they bend like a daffodil in the wind to get into power.

I want politicians to listen to me, but also challenge me and have the courage to tell me they think I’m wrong. That’s the way to a system based on mutual respect, rather than mutual deception In the 1930s, Winston Churchill was at odds with public opinion and most people in his party on several big issues, and in particular re-armament and the rise of the Nazis. Many respected politicians regarded him as a warmonger.

With the slaughter in the trenches still fresh in millions of minds, his was often a lone voice. But he stayed true to his beliefs, brought people round to them and was proved right in the end. If he had changed with the wind, none of them would have been around. Churchills come round maybe once every couple of hundred years. We can’t expect his kind of vision and resolve as standard.

But we could demand a bit of backbone from our leaders.