Matthew Parris talks Northern Aldborough Festival, the Conservatives and keeping llamas

His family had come back to England not long after the Second World War and were struggling to find work and somewhere to live until his father was offered a job in the North.

“I have the strongest memories of Newsham. It's on the edge of the moors and we used to go for walks up into the moors themselves. It was a lovely place, a great start in life,” he says of his time in what is now Rishi Sunak’s constituency when speaking to The Yorkshire Post.

Parris will return to the county later this month when he is a guest speaker at the Northern Aldborough Festival, exploring his career at St Andrew’s Church in Aldborough, near York, on Wednesday, June 18.

He has worked at the Foreign Office, was Margaret Thatcher’s correspondence clerk and a Conservative MP for West Derbyshire from 1979 to 1986, before moving on to present television show Weekend World.

But it was with The Times, which he joined in 1988, that he became recognised as a major force in political prose. He was the paper’s parliamentary sketch writer for 13 years and went on to be a diary columnist – his Notebook pieces now run on Tuesdays – and in 2015 he won the British Press Award for columnist of the year.

Parris has written a number of books, including autobiography Chance Witness: An Outsider's Life in Politics, which won the Orwell Prize in 2002.

However, in Aldborough, one of the things he wants to talk about is failure. “I've failed at least five times, sometimes spectacularly, in my life, but I think if you just keep trying, then sooner or later you find something you can do. I was 39 before I was first offered a job in journalism, and I've never looked back.”

He spent seven years as an MP, but does not think he was very good at being a politician.

“You need to join a gang in politics and I was always a little bit of a loner,” he says. “It was Mrs Thatcher's government, her first government, and I supported her, I still admire her but sometimes I disagreed with things and I don't think I learned to shut my mouth in the way that I ought to have.

"I liked the constituency work. I've sometimes said that politics feeds your vanity and starves your self-respect, but it's nice to be the prince of your own little patch and you can really help people. You can get things done. But you go down to London and you're lower than vermin, really – the whips disregard you, senior colleagues don't even know your name. It comes as quite a shock, I think, to a newly-elected backbench MP.”

Parris has long been associated with conservatism but Parris, 75, relinquished his Tory membership when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was sacking the likes of grandee Kenneth Clarke – he was among those aiming to block a No Deal split from the European Union – and "great men and women were all out on their ear, and I thought that was just the last straw”.

Parris says: “I've left the Conservative Party. I would still vote Conservative but I'm not a member any longer, and I think they're in a dreadful place. I know people are talking about getting rid of the leader but the leader isn't the problem. They're just stuck with a terrible reputation... Sunak didn't do badly but you've got Boris Johnson, you've got Liz Truss, and so they start from a bad place and now they're being challenged to the right by Reform, and I don't think they know what to do - and I'm not sure I know what they should do.”

However, he believes that the party is failing to court many moderate Conservatives who could boost its prospects.

“The danger for conservatives, or for the Conservative Party, is that they're so scared of Reform on the right, they forget that there are a lot of very middle-of-the-road, quite liberal-minded people in Britain who do vote Conservative, who would - and are already - going over to the Liberal Democrats. So the Tories have to remember that if they reposition themselves too far to the right, they're going to lose a lot of moderate Conservative voters, of whom I would be one.

He adds: “I think the Tories should stop obsessing about the red wall seats and look at where they are strong, which is, well, in places like Harrogate, in places like Rishi Sunak’s constituency (Richmond in North Yorkshire) and also down in the south and south east and the west country of England. They have a lot to lose there from moderate Conservatives.”

Although his time as an MP in Derbyshire was relatively short, his love for the area remains and he lives there with his partner Julian Glover.

“When after seven years I decided politics wasn't really for me, I found it easy to leave politics but I couldn't bear to leave Derbyshire, so I've lived there for the rest of my… well, I expect to die there too. I just love the county. I love the Peak District,” he says, adding that the area is “a somewhat unknown county. People know the National Park - Britain's oldest National Park - but the rest of the county, I think people are a bit vague about where it is.”

It is, he says, “a transitional place, but a beautiful one”.

And a good spot to keep llamas, too - something inspired by his travels in the mountains of South America (he has earned a reputation for travel writing too).

“I saw a lot of llamas there in the Andes and thought, gosh, if they can survive the Andes, they could survive Derbyshire. Then I found there were lots of lots of llamas in Britain and now I've become a llama keeper. They're very easy to keep. They're great lawnmowers, very destructive of trees so keep them away from trees! But the thing about llamas is, unlike sheep, llamas have characters. Now, I expect a sheep farmer will tell you that sheep have characters, but llamas really are very different: there are cheerful ones, grumpy ones, co-operative ones, obstinate ones.”

Sounds a little like the halls of Westminster.

For tickets to An Evening with Matthew Parris, for which only a small number remain, visit: aldboroughfestival.co.uk