Andrew Marr: ‘I’ve had an incredibly good decade since my stroke’

‘My wife was told I might not make it, then that I might need a wheelchair’: Andrew Marr. Photograph: David Levene/The Observer

I was brought up in a very warm, traditional household in a Scottish agricultural village near Dundee. My dad was an investment trust manager, my mum was an intellectual doing Open University degrees while looking after us. It was a very arty, bookish household.

I wanted to form a cell of the Chinese Communist party at boarding school. I’d been reading about Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which I thought was a fantastic idea, so I wrote to the Chinese embassy in London. They sent back a huge box of Little Red Books, which I distributed everywhere. My teachers were a little bemused.