Relatively Speaking: Andrew Pierce

The great polemicist Andrew Pierce on the search for his birth mother and the writing of his memoir Finding Margaret

I loved my mum and had a fantastic upbringing. But there is something inside an adopted child: you need to know who you look like and why you look like them. At the age of 48, I decided to track down my birth mother.

I thought she would have been 16 or 17, perhaps 18, when she had me. Imagine my utter amazement when I discovered that she had been three weeks from her 35th birthday. Quite staggering.

She called me Patrick James Connolly. I was in an orphanage until I was nearly three, then adopted and brought up on a council estate in Swindon. I went to a comprehensive school. Of the four children in our family, I was the only one who was adopted. My siblings have never resented me.

My first newspaper job was in Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, which was where the orphanage had been. It was an awful Victorian orphanage, long since closed. Then I went to work in Birmingham, before moving on to the national papers.

When I eventually tracked down my birth mother, she was in Birmingham. My second job had been there, and I hadn’t known.

She had subsequently married a man called Patrick, who knew nothing about me. She was nearly 38 when she married. So the story I discovered was quite different from the one I had imagined. I had expected a teenage mother. Instead, here was a woman well into adulthood, with a part of her life her husband knew nothing about.

We met, and then there were subsequent meetings arranged between us. She didn’t turn up. She would leave me waiting outside British Home Stores in Birmingham.

It became a roller-coaster story. I had never written a book before, but that search became Finding Margaret. There is a story in it about the man who may have been my birth father, too. If you read it, I would be curious to know whether you think he really was. There are questions about whether he was a convenient name and explanation. It is more of a thriller in places. It will make you cry and make you laugh.

My upbringing also explains something about why I first voted Conservative. My father worked on an assembly line. When they worked, that is: strikes were a constant problem for our family in the 1970s.

At the 1979 election, I kept saying to my parents that they should listen to this woman, Margaret Thatcher. She was saying she would bring in secret ballots for strikes. I thought that could transform our family’s life.

I remember a woman across the road who had a Tory poster in her window. I worked in a local shop, and people would say: “Who does she think she is?” That was how class-driven it was in those days.

It is no secret that, if you go into my study at home, there is a life-size cutout of Mrs Thatcher. I got to know her a little in her declining years. I thought she was the greatest.

But I also have an admiration for Tony Blair. I think he did many bad things, but he was a great salesman. He had a substantial team around him: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Jack Straw. I struggle to see the same collection of big beasts now.

Blair arrived in office looking optimistic, telegenic and full of big ideas. The economy he inherited was in great shape. There was enthusiasm for him, and that mattered when the rows began. Things which might have brought enormous trouble later in his premiership barely dented him at the beginning.

I also admired Ken Livingstone as mayor of London. I disagreed with a lot of what he did, but he was a big figure. Boris was in his element as mayor, too. Whatever my disagreements with them, both made an impression in that job.

And the Conservatives have to get out of the habit of constantly chopping off their leaders’ heads. It is no good. At some point a leader has to be given a chance to get on with the job. The manoeuvring never seems to stop. They are always manoeuvring, the Tories.

Being in government is very difficult. The Civil Service doesn’t make things happen instantly. Ministers get frustrated. You need people around you who know what they are doing.

And coming from a poor background has never made me envy people who can send their children to private school. I think: great. I wish I could do it. It is something people want to aspire to.

I was brought up on a council estate. My father’s working life affected our whole family. Those experiences were there long before the newspaper columns and the political arguments.

I loved my upbringing, but at 48 I still wanted to find out where I had come from.

Andrew Pierce was speaking at a Finito event at the East India Club