Depending on your age the 1st May 1997 may be significant or may mean absolutely nothing. It was of course the day that Labour won its landslide victory in the general election and for the next 13 years changed my life.

So much has been written about the period of the New Labour government and I have thousands of words dedicated to my time in Parliament on my old websites.

But today at SajeImpact the reflection is more about those big changes that mean your life takes a completely different direction. I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I do now without that victory in 1997. I have often wondered where I would be.

In reality I was a reasonable local government officer and would probably have stayed in a similar field. I had already progressed quite nicely by my late 20s so on a trajectory of similar colleagues I guess i might have ended up as Chief Executive or Director somewhere in the local/ regional/ national government/ Quango scene. Funnily enough I would probably be nowhere near national sports policy. Wow how different life would look. I certainly wouldn’t have been brave enough to start my own company in 2010 and make it work!

So I am grateful for May 1st 1997. It broke down the artificial barriers that existed for working class kids like me. I had assumed that I wouldn't fit in the upper middle class environment of the senior political world. And I didn’t, so I helped start to change that environment to be more diverse. It taught me that the over privileged who thought (and still do with Johnson et al) that they were better than me and my type were in fact a fraud. They hid behind a bit of Latin and some knowledge of the classics to make them feel superior. What I discovered was their privilege was a cover for some rather stupid people being given power. I have held that ever since. I give a lot of respect to people who earn and deserve it. I don’t give it automatically. It is a lesson worth learning.

There were many great memories being the candidate during that 1997 campaign and the galleries below give a brief taste of some of that period.