Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a politician.

Until the last election he'd enjoyed a brilliant career, the son of a Spanish

intellectual father and a Scottish mother.

He'd won a scholarship to Cambridge, got a first, become a Conservative MP, and in a series of

important government positions, the darling of the right.

Then he lost his seat in what's been described as the most memorable possibly moment of the last election.

Now he's back in Parliament, apparently an altogether more thoughtful sort of chap,

who enjoys looking back at his Spanish roots,

has embraced social liberalism and admitted to gay

experiences in his youth. We politicians, he said, have just got to be a bit more

normal. He is Michael Portillo. I presume, Michael, that being out of politics

has given birth to all of that feeling, stripped of the trappings of office and back on the

number eight buses you've put it. It is a very abnormal life being in politics and

particularly being in government and whether you wish to or not you do become a bit

separated from normal existence. But it's more than that and you sound as if you've been

chastened by the experience?

Well I think I was, of course.

I was defeated.

My ministerial career and my parliamentary career

came to an end at the same moment.

...