May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast.

Campbell frames a childhood act of refusal—declining to watch the monarch’s Christmas broadcast—as his “earliest memory” of political conflict, suggesting that political identity can form first in the intimate arena of family life rather than in public institutions. The joke about “classic Freudian stuff” acknowledges how disputes over authority figures (here, the Queen) can echo parent–child dynamics, while also deflating the moment with self-aware humor. The quote implies that politics is not only policy and parties but also symbols, rituals, and loyalties; rejecting a national ceremony becomes an early assertion of independence and skepticism toward inherited deference.