I find myself for the first time in my life in perfect sympathy with a Tory. Disconcerting. In my defence, this sudden influx of common feeling has nothing to do with any matter of policy.

It’s at a personal level that I feel for Charles Walker MP, after his recent parliamentary speech about his obsessive-compulsive disorder. In bad periods, he (as a self-proclaimed “fruitcake”) has to wash his hands hundreds of times a day and becomes tormented by the idea that if he doesn’t do something – put an item back in a certain way, or say a certain phrase a certain number of times – then something terrible will happen to him or his family. He described it as being like “a hundred little blackmails a day” and I thought “Bang on, Chucky Egg. Bang on.”

My OCD came on when I was six and accidentally drank some weedkiller. My mother rushed me to the sink and my dad made me swallow salt water so that I was sick. It was dramatic and frightening but better, of course, than dying. From then on, I became obsessed with germs. Germs that wanted to do me a deep, personal and quite possibly fatal wrong. They were everywhere, but especially in crowds, on things in shops and on carpets. I refused to go barefoot anywhere, even at home. I edged round shops with my arms pressed fiercely against my sides, like a miniature hyperventilating guardsman. Any strange speck or mark in or on anything – especially food – could be toxic and was spurned by my ever-alert infant self.

Soon I began something which I now know is common in OCD sufferers, “catastrophising” – that is, instantly envisaging the worst possible outcome to any given situation, no matter how innocuous. I became consumed with anxiety about how I was going to run home in under four minutes if (or rather, when) nuclear war was declared while I was at school. My mother solved that one by assuring me that my understanding of modern warfare was flawed. There would be a build-up to war and as soon as any bellicose mutterings began she absolutely promised to keep my sister and me home so that we would all die together. It’s a good job the Bay of Pigs wasn’t on any primary school curriculum in Eighties Catford, otherwise that might not have worked as quite the charm it did.

"I think everyone has a degree of OCD"