In an excellent essay I wrote for this magazine at the start of the year – ‘Sir’ Ed Davey’s Lib Dems are the real nasty party’ – I touched on my adolescent crush on the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe:

‘I felt confusion watching Thorpe speak – he sounded so kind, yet looked so cruel – but dismissed this as a paradox of sex appeal, which he certainly had, having outraged his classmates at Eton by announcing that he planned to marry Princess Margaret, at that time second in line to the throne.