While at Oxford I was still uncertain where my ultimate political allegiance might lie. There could be no doubt where my own self-interest lay, (as a landed aristocrat with a fair sum of capital already transferred to my name, in order that the family could survive the next batch of death duties); but I had been disgusted by the dearth of empathy, which I had witnessed in many of the conversations where right wing values prevailed. At the same time I had been alarmed by the venomous sentiments that I'd heard expressed concerning people of my kind, by both public and private figures who evidently had an axe to grind. I found it a difficult choice to decide where I might really belong.

Back in the 1950's, there was still a feeling that the issue between the Left and the Right was on the score of whether the world was heading for a Communist or a Fascist world order. All right, the Fascists had officially been routed during the recent World War. But I knew how (within my own family in effect) those ideals were still very much alive. Not that my own sympathies lay in either of those directions, because I detested Totalitarian attitudes of any kind. They triggered memories of rigid intolerance which instantly prompted my identification with whatever opposition might prove possible under those circumstances.

I was in fact telling myself that my personal political ideals must lie within the traditional democratic fold. But the problem (as I saw it) was that democrats had never taken the trend of their own ideas to its logical conclusion. They might preach the concept of `one man, one vote', but within the world order they were seeking to create - on the floor of the United Nations Assembly - this principle had lapsed. There were the big powers and the little powers; and there was no way that a vote on the floor of the assembly was going to determine the direction of world policy. That was a matter that we left to be sorted out behind closed doors, within those secret enclaves of privileged access to power. Nor was there the slightest demand that each delegate at the United Nations should represent an approximately equal proportion of the human population.

It was on this point of dissatisfaction with the existing formula for world democracy that instigated my curiosity to discern how there might be a system that could function in closer implementation of the democratic ideal, with `one man, one vote' translated (on the international plane) into `one region, one vote'. I'd seen that man's concept of nationhood was thwarting his potential for evolving the democratic ideal towards its logical conclusion.

I was travelling a fair amount around Western Europe at the time, and I was taking note how the countries demarcated upon the European atlas were often comprised from smaller entities, where an individuality of culture and lifestyle prevailed. The men of Saxony and Bavaria were an utterly different species - as indeed were the people in Normandy and Provence, in Tuscany and Calabria, in Catalonia and Andalusia. But it was the distinctiveness between different regions in the Benelux group of countries, between Flanders and Wallonia for example, or between the north and south of Holland, which really brought my attention to the complexity of European diversity.

On returning to Britain, I observed how the whole issue of Devolution was coming into focus for the first time this century, with both Scots and Welsh demanding autonomy. It would certainly be a move in the right direction; but the nationalistic overtones of both Scotland and Wales were dangerous from my particular standpoint. What required to be made manifest was that all the regions of Britain should demand similar degrees of autonomy, with their loyalty switching from Westminster to the European Parliament, in the hopes that we might truly initiate a new political format for the continent as a whole, in a United Regions of Europe.

When I presented myself as the Wessex Regionalist candidate for West Wiltshire in the general election of February 1974, I felt that I was making a significant stand, both for myself (in that this was the first occasion in my life when I had gone public to make a definitive statement upon the subject of my political position), but also for political theory as a whole in that it brought into focus what the devolutionary logic really entailed. It certainly didn't have to be a backward-looking movement, nostalgically hankering for the re-emergence of long past national status, but it could instead be portrayed as the brightest case yet devised for nudging both Britain and Europe as a whole into the forefront of political relevance, on the subject of the evolution of democracy towards its ultimate global realisation.

I was content with the 521 votes that I obtained. (No one had supposed for a second that I might avoid losing my deposit.) During the campaign I received many letters, with some of them urging me to establish a Wessex Regionalist Party so that others could join me in the fray. As a result of this I was able to field seven candidates in the general election of 1979, (with a grand total of 3090 votes between the bunch of us,) and I also presented myself as the Wessex Regionalist candidate for the first Euro-election that same year - in a constituency which the authorities had (almost deferentially?) named as `Wessex'. But my own purpose in standing was to place the theory of government which I was advocating firmly within the European context, and I obtained 1706 votes for my efforts.