“I WANT TO LIVE like common people,” sings Jarvis Cocker. “I want to do whatever common people do.”

Pulp are not alone. Michael Portillo has done it in Liverpool as a single mum, Alan Duncan has done it in a tent with youth trainees, Piers Merchant did it in his Tyneside constituency among the poor, and Clare Short has done it in Southfields with schoolkids. In recent years, living in the love (or otherwise) of the common people has been an experience politicians have wanted to try. On television, naturally.

Without being bigheaded, I think I can claim to have been the first. With a mainstream current affairs programme in 1984, we started a trend. Not that I realised it at the time. I thought I had simply made a fool of myself.

Now, 20 years on, the man who directed that documentary has invited me to make a fool of myself again. I agreed.

The first programme was not my idea but that of an enthusiastic and hard-driving young television director, Stuart Prebble. Twenty years ago, as one of the youngest Tory MPs, I accepted his challenge, thrown down for Granada Television’s World in Action programme, to try living for a week in winter in Newcastle upon Tyne on the £26.80 which was at the time a single unemployed man’s supplementary benefit.

“Why me?” I asked, when Granada rang. “We’ve tried your colleagues,” they replied, “but nobody else dares. Most said no, straight out. One inquired how much we were prepared to pay, and when told we would pay nothing but the £26.80 he rang off.”

So I had to say yes. The media world was about to hit me with the most almighty wallop.

Two decades later, at the end of last year, Stuart challenged me to repeat the experience and to make the comparisons. I would try living in the same place, on the same benefit (or its 21st-century equivalent) and we would look for some of the characters and families I encountered 20 years ago. What had happened to them, to Scotswood, to Newcastle, and to me? The success of the formula (and I’m afraid it has become rather a formula) is not hard to understand. There is an element of both voyeurism and Schadenfreude, of course, in watching those set above us suffer. If the star of the show is generally liked, as Clare Short is, then her audience may feel for her as she tries to be a teacher in Southfields; and they may be genuinely interested in how she performs.

If the star is a controversial figure and something of a celeb, like Michael Portillo, then fans will want to see him succeed (and critics will hope to see him fail) in a world very different from the world he has become used to. Most viewers (and I do not discount myself) will feel curious to know how well he can cope, how adaptable he is, how much emotional intelligence he posseses and how easily his skills at Westminster translate into raising four kids on a pittance. I found Portillo’s Mersey sojourn compulsive viewing, and liked him a little more at the end of it. I, however, was hardly known when I set out for Scotswood, a desperately depressed suburb of Newcastle, on a raw winter’s day with a Granada camera crew in tow. A couple of months later I was famous, and I never really looked back, quitting politics the following year for television and journalism. That programme made me.

What that World in Action programme’s record 13 million viewers (nearly a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom) knew was that I was a young Tory Turk in a party which had just cut welfare benefits by 5 per cent while presiding over an economy in which whole forests of jobs in manufacturing were falling to the monetarist axe. They heard me say at the beginning of the programme, in a speech to winesipping and vol-au-vent munching Tory ladies, that I thought unemployment ought to be uncomfortable, to sharpen the appetites of the jobless for work. And they longed to see me brought low. That is what they had tuned in for.

They were not disappointed. I had run out of funds before my week was up, and been left shivering in the dark without the 50p I needed to work the electricity meter.

From World in Action’s point of view this was the ideal result: indeed I sensed they were pretty determined to get it. From the viewers’ standpoint it was undoubtedly the best possible turn of events: the public found it delicious.

But what I did not realise, although I have come to understand it since, was that this was also the best outcome for me, for my reputation and for my career. At the time it felt like a catastrophe. In answering Granada’s challenge I had ignored the reported advice of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the direct advice of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, as well as the warnings of all my Tory parliamentary colleagues.