I was something of an accidental businessman.

I had never set out, nor seen myself, as someone who would run or own companies. In fact I had actively avoided anything in my education that smacked too much of seeking a ‘career’.

This was, of course, desperately daft. I blame the grandparents.

Granddad, a miner and Union man gave simple advice on life: “Get and education, but stick with your class son”. You had to respect him, because of what he had lived through, but as he was dying in the 1970s his epoch was dying with him.

None of this was grounding for business and, despite having found making money through my DJ activities pretty easy, I really wanted to change the world. So instead of becoming an engineer - one of the people who really change the world - I went into political life.

Things are never what you expect. This doesn’t mean that people are delusional - in my case I suppose I hadn’t expected much. I learned long since that Members of Parliament were not switched on people with a command of economics, ideology and with great rhetorical powers. I my teens I had naively expected they were. One of the reasons the Labour Party got into such an unholy mess in the 70s was the reality that MPs were more often than not time serving former union officials who were now too fat to fit down a mineshaft.

It had to change and it did. Today’s MPs, of all parties, may still have feet of clay, but the vast majority give doing the job as a constituency representative far more time and effort than was the case in the past.

After working for the party machine for a number of years one other great deficiency had become all too apparent. Although politicians and their parties talked a lot about the economy there was very little understanding of economics and even less of business in the Labour Party of the 70s and 80s.

By now I had understood one of the things about myself that is really important in business. It helps if you don’t like being told what to do! It was time to get out.

The computer industry was definitely one of the places to be at that time. I joined a firm that had made its name and its money doing databases for PCs and networks at the time when that was really the domain of the big box that filled an air-conditioned room. We were mainly a software outfit, but at the time it was still possible for a smallish firm to make money flogging PCs - so we did.

They were very sales led with staff who were Spitting Image caricatures of the ‘young, thrusting executive’. Most of them would have taken it as a compliment to be described as a ‘young, thrusting executive’. In fact they mostly referred to themselves as ‘executives’ - they must have been, it said so on their business cards. They spoke in something called ‘K’s - this could refer apparently to money or memory - either way 50 was a lot. So amid the Golf GTIs, the Seirra Cosworths, and the Audi Whatevers there I was.

They all took themselves terribly seriously, but it was a successful firm and there was certainly a culture of enterprise about the place. Unlike a big business, where you meet your line manager and if you’re lucky, or not the people a rung or two up from them, in a medium sized outfit if you were any good you got close to the centre and saw how it all worked. It was a means to an end - I learned how and how not to run a business.

Gradually the good people left one-by-one to do their own thing most of them made a go of it and I was no exception.

So I ended up being a businessman and then everything I had done, in a rather unrelated way, started to come in handy: economics, media, leading people, marketing, art, communications, software, performing, selling. It all helped.

Conventional wisdom runs that if you have run your own show you make yourself unemployable. I think that’s mistaken. In reality everyone is accountable to someone - whether it’s your customers, your shareholders, your board, your manager or your voters. We’ve all got some kind of boss.

What is true is that being in business, if you are the sort of person who thinks, makes you understand the value of personal freedom.