I’ve been on tour around the UK with my stage show about identity called A Show All About You. In Edinburgh it coincided with the last weekend of my retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy. I dropped in for an hour and sat on a bench so people could come and sit next to me to chat. Someone said on viewing my exhibition, which deals with many social issues, that they could not tell which way I vote. This pleased me. In my stage show I talk a lot about the tense relationship between our conscious intellect and our embodied intuition. I describe myself as a Tory voter trapped in a Labour voter’s body. I also talk about the dangers of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, then I ask the audience if they would support proportional representation. Everywhere I go people are overwhelmingly in favour.

Another game I play with my audiences is to ask them to respond instantly and intuitively as to whether certain things are Tory or Labour. Hanging baskets and David Beckham, always firmly Tory, cargo bikes and further education always rock-solid Labour. One question I’m tempted to ask is: ‘Culture – Tory or Labour?’ I quite often find myself in the company of museum directors. I like to tease them by asking: ‘When is your next Tory exhibition?’ (I once made Oliver Dowden, who was then culture secretary, choke on his asparagus by putting this question to Maria Balshaw, director of Tate.) A slightly embarrassed laugh often follows. For they know as well as I do that they frequently host shows that could be interpreted as left-wing but rarely if ever stage exhibitions that are intentionally right of centre. I offer to correct this imbalance by installing a large Tracey Emin-style neon sign on the front of the museum saying: ‘Who the hell do you think pays for all this?’

An important part of my art is printmaking. Every so often I have to go to the printmaker’s studio to sign a batch of fresh etchings or woodblocks. On my most recent visit I signed a small special edition which I am donating in support of the Labour party. The edition is of a piece called ‘Vote for Me’ in multiple shades of red. It’s a self-portrait of me dressed up as Margaret Thatcher. Next to me on the table is a pile of books mainly on the subject of England and Englishness. The top one, though, is a volume I bought as a very young nascent transvestite entitled How to Be a Woman Though Male. It was written in the 1960s as a how-to book for the gender non-conforming. I found it completely useless.

After my gig at the delightful Tyne Theatre & Opera House in Newcastle there was the usual patient gaggle of fans waiting for signatures and selfies. A woman came up to me and thrust a printout of a close-up photo of one of my works in my face. It was from a large etching called ‘The American Dream’ about the culture war in the US. It was of a detail smaller than a credit card from a print the size of a dining table. It showed a jet fighter with the letters GBTQI+A written on it. I recall viewing a proof of this work at the printers and noticing the error. ‘Why have you left off the L?’ the woman spat. ‘It was a mistake,’ I replied. ‘No it wasn’t,’ she corrected me. I tried to explain that my daughter is gay so I was hardly going to leave out the lesbians deliberately, but she stormed off, still sure in her indignation. It made me wonder: ‘Has she just sat through my show and absorbed nothing?’

I’m not sure whether to feel honoured or miffed that my wife and I are included on Nicky Haslam’s 2023 list of common things, alongside ‘grieving’ and ‘the Northern Lights’. I think I’ll take it as a compliment, as whenever I’ve met him he’s been a delight and we have bonded over a shared interest in rubber fetishism.

Like Nicky, I still enjoy a posh do such as the trustees dinner at the British Museum. I’m a recently retired trustee and our current chair, George Osborne, came over to chat. It being two days after the announcement that his old mucker David Cameron was to be ennobled and become foreign secretary, he confirmed he was a bit bored of that topic. I can’t recall what else we talked about as I was at least three glasses in at that point. I have over the years chatted at parties to many of the architects of our current political situation – Farage, Gove, Johnson, Cummings, Cameron, Hancock – but don’t expect any revelatory nuggets of gossip. I can never remember.