I mean getting into parliament was quite an achievement in itself and then I have to pinch myself at the thought of actually running a department.
The child in the womb has no voice but Parliament's. Many MPs who voted for the 1967 Act did not think they were abandoning the unborn because they were fooled by the supposed safeguards. Now we know just how ineffective those safeguards are.
After 23 years closeted at Westminster, where often all you can see out of the windows are other parliamentary buildings, I appreciate space, and I retired to Dartmoor to find it.
I shall not miss the hectoring and backbiting and the lack of generosity towards fallen foes, but I will miss the sheer clubability of parliament. If one fancies a coffee or a meal or a drink then it is always possible to find at least one person out of 646 whose company is congenial.
Having served as a member of parliament for more than two decades, I'm well aware that there can be genuine constraints that affect the speed at which certain issues progress.
I was still in parliament when the Labour government passed the Freedom of Information Act. As the then shadow home secretary I queried whether in some areas it did enough to open up the work of government to public scrutiny.
If you'd said to me when I was 21, 'You're going to get into parliament, be a senior minister of state, shadow health secretary, shadow home secretary, a privy councillor, be endorsed by the Times as a candidate for Speaker, have four novels published, and then have great fun after you retire,' I'd have said, 'That sounds like a good life.'
Parliament was an institution of enormous standing when I was aspiring to go in. It isn't now.
If we had a vote in parliament, the majority of MPs would not vote for a hard Brexit.
There is a continuous stream of opinions on governance issues expressed daily, not only in our Parliament and in the print media, but also on talk-radio and social media.
