I suppose I'd better confess. It's what the times require. So let me apologise now for having once lived off immoral earnings.

It all happened in the Nineties. And I only did it once. But the memory hangs heavy on my conscience to this day. My specific sin was to profit from someone else's work, by passing it off as my own.

In 1995 I wrote a book called Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right, in itself an act that suggests a somewhat impaired predictive ability. The work was not greeted with the same tumultuous response from the reviewers as, say, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day or Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. It didn't even succeed in earning a certain credit for sheer chutzpah, in the manner of Chris Moyle's memoirs or Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries. In fact, writing approvingly of Conservative ideas in 1995, and looking forward to their future flourishing, was a bit like launching a work today entitled Unsung Heroes: What We Owe to Investment Bankers or Dubya stands for Wonderworker: the Many Amazing Achievements of the Second George Bush.

When my work hit the bookshops it was greeted by most figures in the literary world as the publishing equivalent of erecting a nuclear waste disposal site next to a nursery. Yes, this sort of stuff had to be dealt with. But not in front of the children. And, please, don't imagine it's seemly to make a profit out of it.

I always say the reception to the book was mixed. But only in the same way a dry martini is mixed - scarcely anything got in the way of the bitterness and it was all overwhelmingly icy. But there was one line that even the harshest critics applauded. Writing about the reactionary don Maurice Cowling I recounted his decision not to seek holy orders after the Second World War but instead to go back to his Cambridge college. “He returned not to God,” I wrote, “but to Jesus.”

OK, it's not Oscar Wilde, I grant you, but some people liked it. However, the real sadness is that not only is it not Oscar Wilde, it's not even Michael Gove. The one line in the book that earned plaudits was written by my editor, a wonderful man called Clive Priddle. It is certainly true that Jesus redeemed my work, but it was my editor who saved me.

T.S. Eliot, a literal genius

I praise his name now because it is editors who save me still by coming up with all the best lines. And I see that the reputation of the editor is somewhat under siege with the revelation that T.S. Eliot rejected Animal Farm when he was editing texts at Faber & Faber because he wanted it rewritten. He thought the pigs in the fable of communist betrayal were “far more intelligent than the other animals and therefore best qualified to run the farm”. The answer, he thought, to the farm's problems was not revolution but “more public-spirited pigs”.

Of all the things one wants in a literary executive, literal-mindedness is the least useful trait. One can only imagine T.S. Eliot's response to J.K. Rowling: “Surely you cannot have a train platform that is 9, you can't have locomotives leaving a setting denominated by a vulgar fraction... and doesn't Lord Voldemort have a point, it would appear that pure-bred wizards are more intelligent and are therefore best qualified to run the Ministry of Magic...”

And thank heavens he never published The Lord of the Rings: “Surely Saruman's decision to ally with Sauron was a shrewd exercise in realpolitik. Rather than a vain effort to dethrone the ruler of Mordor led by barefoot and hoydenish yokels surely we just need more public-spirited Dark Lords?”

Of course, T.S. Eliot was famously a banker as well as a publisher and poet. Mind you, it was a different world then and he could never have succeeded in finance today. Imagine - a banker with an inability to believe in fantastic tales and a grim determination to ask boringly difficult questions when faced with wild inventions. That really is almost impossible to credit.

Let's get the party started

Thanks to your inspirational responses, the Campaign for Real Aperitifs, launched in these pages last week, is off to a flying start. Can I thank one of Westminster's leading political journalists for his tips on the perfect G and T (Hendrick's Gin, at 41.4 per cent alcohol, Fever Tree Tonic and cucumber - quite delicious). May I also draw attention to the exceptionally competitive pricing at Sainsbury's for Monin pure cane sugar syrup - indispensable for a jug of springtime mojitos.

And while T.S. Eliot may not always have got the point of anthropomorphic anti-totalitarian satires, he certainly upheld the virtues of the traditional aperitif. In his verse drama (now there's another tradition worth reviving) The Cocktail Party, the host offers a drink with these words: “Let me prepare it for you, if I may... Strong... but sip it slowly... and drink it sitting down.”

Is there a more beguiling line in all of 20th-century writing?

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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