I remember the day after the general election when Harold Wilson had lost, I remember quite clearly cycling from my house in Hutton along Long Ridings and feeling what a relief to live in a country with a Tory government again.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was proud to be a Tory Member of Parliament for twelve years, proud to represent Buckingham as a Tory, proud to have voted with my party 99% of the time as the record shows.
The whole of the situation of the Conservative Party today springs from that night when they dismissed the best prime minister the country had had since Churchill.
Don't get me wrong: there are some fantastic people who work at British Cycling who kept me together, who were there when I was struggling with it all. They were walking the same tightrope in many ways, because if you do speak up, your days are numbered.
I remember when Tony Blair came into office, and there was a sense I was thinking, 'Well, what on Earth am I going to do now?' until I realized that's exactly what he was thinking.
When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.
I came into politics because of my opposition to what a Tory Government was doing to the community I grew up in.
What I hope is in five years' time, I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked, but it has worked.
I became a Conservative in the late 1980s because I could see that the Conservative party had transformed Britain's economy and our standing in the world compared to Labour in the 1980s.
I still cherish the memory of walking into the Parliament for the first time.
There has always been something less than wholesome about New Labour. But Blair for a long time had an easy ride. There was the whopping majority. There was the relief that the Tories were finally gone. There was the grand hyperbole.