After Ben Bradshaw was selected as the Labour candidate for Exeter in 1997, Peter Mandelson apparently said: “Bloody hell, where did you come from?” Bradshaw had been a journalist, BBC Radio’s man on the ground at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He won the seat, at the age of 36, surfing the wave of enthusiasm for Tony Blair. Perhaps more importantly, as an openly gay candidate – only the second in British parliamentary history – he proved that the country had had enough not just of the Tories in general but of raging homophobes. Adrian Rogers, whose majority he...