Penny Mordaunt, MP for Portsmouth North and leader of the Commons, and I both lost our mothers to breast cancer when we were teenagers.

Did you see that coming?

(It’s easier to talk with people if you can identify common ground.)

We were also both the first members of her family to attend university.

I have a Master’s degree. She doesn’t. (She has a BA.)

(I also have two half PhDs. She doesn’t.)

She earns close to £160,000 a year. I don’t.

Her parents both had undertaken education beyond secondary school. My parents had little more than primary school.

Our political views probably couldn’t be further apart.

And yet, there are other things in her background that tell me that there seems to be more that we have in common.

She was educated at a Roman Catholic school. (Rare for England) So was I.

She worked in orphanages in Romania, which continues to surprise me. (I looked into it. It was part of her gap year.)

The secret is to try to keep a dialogue going in spite of often glaring differences. If politicians can’t do that, countries fall apart.

She’s a politician. I’m not.

What made her such a hard-core Conservative? It continues to surprise me because something about this doesn’t seem to add up. It’s where the power is, in England. Maybe that is where she went. Where the power is. Where she thought she could get ahead. That may be the sole explanation. Alternatively, maybe the Conservatives were simply the ones who hired her when other organizations didn’t. (Heck, yes, who knows. I too once wrote to Dominic Cummings, of all people, when he was looking for new people. I was climbing the walls.)