Encounters with a future Tory MP, a popstar, and 25,000 placards

Here’s another episode in my memoirs of being an activist. You can read it at substack, or here!: Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money (a difficult combination to pull off, frankly, and not one I would recommend). My dad had a brilliant idea, resisting which is something about which I have lifelong regrets, which was to go and live with Harry Ree for a few weeks/months and be his factotum. [1] But, I did go and work for CND helping prepare for the big October 24th demonstration in 1981. I had two duties that autumn. One was as an itinerant speaker. Some organization would contact CND and ask for someone to come and explain the case for disarmament, or debate with a Tory, or something like that, and make the case for people attending the march. Obviously, all invitations went to Bruce Kent, by then an unlikely semi-celebrity. But he couldn’t…