I didn’t come out until this year: I’d been nervous of bringing my authentic self to work, afraid that I would be ostracised, so I hid who I really was. But when I finally declared that, yes, I am a Tory stand-up — or, as I prefer, a stand-up who happens to be a Tory — everyone told me that they’d known all along.
I’d always wanted to talk about politics on stage, but never quite knew how — my shtick has always been self-deprecation (though I’m not very good at it) and it’s hard for Conservatives to be self-deprecating when they have an 80-seat majority. It became a whole bunch easier after July of last year; and easier still after I ran for Cornwall council in May. I spent three months knocking on doors, and received fewer votes than Reform’s paper candidate; my wife calculated that I got one vote for every hour I spent on the campaign trail.
