How times change. In 1981, when I was a young Conservative MP I was asked by the Party Whips to become president of an outfit called the British Youth Council. They said it would be good for my career. They were lying, of course, but I did it anyway.

The British Youth Council was a twice-yearly conference at which all youth organisations in Britain were represented. They were all there. From the Scouts to the Young Baptists, from the Young Communist League to the Association of Jewish Youth. At each conference there would be around 200 young people representing over 50 separate organisations.

As you might expect it was very left wing. The few right-wing organisations were heavily outnumbered and sometimes, like the Federation of Conservative Students, were so far to the right as to be unrecognisable as part of a civilised society.

Every six months we would get together for a weekend conference. We would spend two days lambasting the Thatcher Government, calling for the nationalisation of everything that moved and even, on one astonishing occasion, denouncing Michael Foot as a dangerous reactionary.

As president it was my job to take the chair of these conferences. I was treated with the degree of respect usually reserved for the referee in a wrestling match.

When I tried to resign, everyone pleaded with me to stay. The Party Whips did not want the job to go to a Labour MP. The leaders of the BYC itself were sufficiently savvy as to realise that keeping a Tory MP as president was the key to keeping what they really depended on - Government funding. So I was stuck with it for my full three-year term.

My original decision to take on the job had been largely driven by the BYC's director. He told me that the organisation could benefit from a degree of stability, that they would respect my political judgement - all that sort of thing. And I fell for it.

In 1983 the Government proposed that unemployment benefit should not be an automatic entitlement to all young people. If they were offered jobs or places on paid training courses, the Government said, then unemployment benefit should be cut if they did not accept those offers.

The BYC went mad. Led by the National Organisation of Labour Students, it passed a motion deploring this "attack on the natural liberties of young people everywhere."

Young people should have the choice, so the argument went, between working and living on the dole. To remove the right to the dole was to remove one of life's eternal freedoms.

When I pointed out, ever so gently, that the dole had to be paid for by taxes on people who had chosen to work, there followed one of several motions of no confidence in me as president. Further, a dark rumour was circulated that I was just a plant for the CIA.

Now all of this would normally be a matter of little interest and of historical irrelevance. But who were the leaders of the Labour Students? One was John Denham, now a heavily Blairite NHS Minister. Another was Fiona McTaggart, now the right-wing MP for Slough. And who was that convincing director of the BYC? None other than Peter Mandelson.

Do you think they were, perhaps, listening to me after all?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.