I’M SO glad I was a teenager in the sixties. The music, the fun, (and everything else) have never been surpassed.

There’s just one problem: we never thought we’d grow old. Yet I’ll be seventy next year.

Today is my last sitting day as Blackburn’s MP. The average length of service for MPs is just 11 years. So I’ve been incredibly lucky.

MORE TOP STORIES:

Totting it up my 36 years has meant over 2,000 advice surgeries. Since 1983 they have all been on a walk-in no-appointment basis. It’s meant 1,400 new cases a year, with 17,000 constituents (more than a quarter of the families in town) on our database for the past ten years. Over the same decade, 140 residents’ meetings, and 60 soapbox sessions.

Among the highlights: my first election in 1979. I had to keep pinching myself – as a lad from an Essex council estate I’d achieved what I’d thought as a distant fantasy of becoming an MP. I pinched myself again in 1997 when, after 18 years in opposition, Tony Blair made me Home Secretary My most magical moment? May 14, 1995, Anfield, when, with my two children William (14), and Charlotte (12), we saw Rovers win the Premiership, our first English league title for 81 years. We were walking on air.

The low points? The worst was May 1981, when I got a terrible virus which completely knocked out the hearing in my right ear, replacing it by tinnitus, my uninvited companion ever since. I became seriously depressed – compounded by terrible infighting within the Labour Party, which almost led to our annihilation in 1983.

I’m deeply proud of what has been achieved in the town since 1979. On any objective basis Blackburn is simply in much better shape than it was 36 years ago. A University Centre was once simply a dream. Now, it’s thriving. The Mall’s doing brilliantly; we’ve the Cathedral Quarter and new bus station, and the prospect (at last!) of improved rail services too.

There are plenty of challenges too, not least how we better bind together the white and Asian communities, and above all how we sustain prosperity.

I may be finishing as MP, but I’m not disappearing. In May I take over as Chair of the Blackburn Youth Zone and I’ll be able to devote more time as well to being a Governor of Blackburn College.

Lastly, some thanks – to my wife and family; to my staff, party colleagues, my many friends in East Lancashire; to the Lancashire Telegraph, which in a very cold climate for local papers does an outstanding job. And then to everyone in town who has given me the wonderful privilege of being your MP.

Thank you.