Well, maybe Chris will come to my doorstep and I can ask him directly why he chose to take me to one side at that lunch and say what he did.
I used to have a great deal of respect for Chris. When he first replaced Archie Hamilton as our Tory candidate and then MP he seemed like a young, hard-working, intelligent and reasonably liberal man. My wife and I, who have always tended to be a little left of centre (and I do mean a little) actually thought at one time it might be worth voting for him as an excellent constituency MP.
The rot set in once he achieved Shadow office, his policies and behaviour became more and more infected by the underhand slime of the nasty end of the Nasty Party.
When he was Shadow Health Secretary he created a stupid headline grabbing scam because he had found one lady who had been poorly treated by the NHS (something to do with her shoulder? I forget.) With all his background in Cambridge and the BBC, you would think that he would have encountered the concept of the Gaussian (Normal) Distribution, whereby however good the NHS was getting there will always be examples of people who are let down by the system.
When I tackled him with this at a dinner at the House of Commons his reply was unbelievably patronising. He agreed (implicitly) that he was using the Tory baying press to score cheap points with people too stupid to think for themselves, and he smirked proudly about this being all his idea.
In the context of this thread, I put this forward as an example of how he will say whatever he thinks will improve his and the Tories ratings, regardless of truth.
Since then Chris has made at least two enormous mistakes in his public utterances.
The first was when his own party employed a cheap political gimmick of recruiting an Army General to their ranks and he went straight on stage and denounced it for the gimmick it was, thinking that it was done by the Labour Party.
The second and much worse was to align himself with the Christian Right and say that some service providers should have a right to debar homosexuals. This from a man who is Shadow Home Secretary and presumably is hoping to be appointed Home Secretary on May 7th.
I really hope that, however shallow and callow David Cameron is, he will at least realise that Chris is too reckless and unpredictable for senior office, even if he doesn't debar him for having homophobic and extremist religious views.
I still don't know why he took me to one side at that lunch, but taken in the context of his other boo-boos I guess it's just par for the course.
The only thing I will say in his favour is that it is brave and responsible for him to step forward and enter this debate online on this forum and respect where respect is due.