Walking home from school when I was eight, we stood hand in hand outside a pub, Jack Straw’s Castle. With tears on his cheeks my father told me about the “heroic” peasants’ revolt in 1381. This was one of his favourite lectures that usually ended with the words “come the revolution”. The morning after Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 I was even sent to primary school sporting a badge pinned to my duffle coat. “Don’t blame me, I voted Labour” it said in red capital letters.

And the effect of all that indoctrination? Well, it worked. Now a grown-up with two daughters of my own I am a socialist just like my father. And unlike most of my friends, I saw it as my parental duty to make my children, Alex and Holly, politically literate too.

In 2003, when Holly was just weeks’ old, I took them on the Stop the War march in London. Making our way on the Underground, two-year-old Alex said to a carriage full of protesters: “No attack Iraq, ’kay? War is bad.” Jaws dropped when she added: “Mummy, why does Uncle Tony like Bad Bush so much?” A question that often rages across our breakfast table.

But talking to my girls about everything from Palestine to party conferences separates me from my friends, who don’t see the need to pass on their political belief system. Recently a friend left her two year-old son with me, warning: “And don’t frighten him about the Middle East, he’s just a baby.”

I could stand being an odd one out while I thought my determination to help my daughters become political “Mini-Mes” would work. But the first niggling doubts were cast by Ken Livingstone. Feeling a flush of guilt when my girls booed Bush on the television, I sought reassurance. Was I right, I asked Ken, to tell my girls that left is right and right is well, wrong?

“They’ll only do the opposite of what you want,” sighed London’s mayor. Brainwashing them could backfire badly, he warned, drawing on his own upbringing to drive home the point: “Both my parents were working-class Tories. No one on either side of my family had voted Labour until I did.”

So was I at risk of turning out Zionist stockbrokers? I decided to poll a few figures with decidedly pronounced views to find out what had swayed them. First was Michael Portillo. Did he get his views from his parents? Well, no, actually. His grew up in a left-wing household.

“I remember in 1959 helping to put the Labour posters in our windows,” said Portillo. “In 1964, though I was only 11, I virtually ran the Labour committee room in our house, and argued with the Tory tellers at the polling station.”

His father was a revolutionary in Spain. “He had given up his country, family, language and career because he opposed Franco,” Portillo added. “Even when I was tiny he talked to me about it.”

Did he become a Tory just to rebel against this indoctrination? “I did not consciously rebel,” said Portillo. “My coming of age coincided with a rotten period in Labour history. The new Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, was exciting . . . we felt more like revolutionaries than conservatives.”

Did he feel he’d let his parents down? “I was slightly embarrassed by breaking from the tradition,” he admitted. “When I supported the death penalty I didn’t want my father to know, because he was a fervent abolitionist. Even now to visit my mother at election time I have to pass through huge Lib Dem posters on stakes in her garden.”

The second person on my list was the liberal-minded comedian Rory Bremner, who said his daughters, two and four, were “too young” to be introduced to politics — though not too young for introductions to the party leaders.

“When I’m being patronising, I always sound like Tony Blair,” said Bremner. “When I’m trying to take something off them I say [he slips into a wicked impersonation, all smiles and teeth]: ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on, I’m not going to hurt you’.”

His own parents were anything but liberal. “They were very right wing,” said Bremner. “My father’s happiest moment was when I stood up aged seven and said: ‘I think the miners should be shot.’ My childhood was Edinburgh middle-class boarding school.”

By 1983 his views had moved radically to the left of his parents. “A lot of the most liberal, left-wing people went to public school,” he said. “Like John Cleese, they send up the people they would have ended up being.” That’s it then. I have to face facts. Talking to my daughters about socialism has not only been a waste of time but may even turn out to be counter-productive.

Perhaps I should take a leaf out of the Iron Lady’s book. When I asked her daughter Carol whether Maggie had breathed political fire into her children the answer was surprising. Not at all, said her daughter. Baroness Thatcher “never brought her job home — no difference to me whether she was a barrister or an MP,” said Carol.

So why did my father’s influence sway me so? On reflection, I realise that it was because the history of the Labour movement was told to me as grand heroic tales, complete with tears and dramatics. But if being a maudlin drinker is the way to guarantee my girls will admire Karl Marx, they’ll have to make up their own minds. From now on, I’ll find people my own age to take on marches.