Article: My own political obituary; MP When he announced his retirement from politics, we asked BRIAN WILSON to assess his career. This is his frank and witty account of 17 years at Westminster.

Byline: BRIAN WILSON

EVERY new MP is going to change the world and bring relief to suffering humanity. In this spirit, a few days after winning Cunninghame North in the 1987 General Election, I approached my first surgery in Saltcoats Town Hall.

A small man with an acute speech impediment was first to enter. ' It's a- a- about my b- b- bubble car, ' he finally managed to announce. There followed a long and tortuous tale of the difficulties he had faced in transferring the registration documents from one vehicle to another.

This was an early intimation that most of an MP's work is of a more humdrum nature than we might like to believe. Yet ...

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