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It's scary to think that twenty years have flown by since Big Bang. When I was doing my A levels a couple of years before I had ignored all the advice of my tutors and applied for the wrong Oxford college (New) in the wrong year (their first year taking women) to do the wrong subject (English) and didn't get past the entrance exam (in the last year people a whole year older than me were allowed to take it after their A levels).

I got offered a place at Durham in the New Year, however, but not satisfied with the idea of living on a student grant (remember them?) I tried to get what used to be called "industrial sponsorship". Doing English, the only people who would entertain the idea were Marks & Spencer's graduate recruitment program, and then only to be a Human Remains officer, so I gave up on that idea.

It was the year of a young copper trader who made the headlines on the London commodities exchanges having become a multi-millionaire at 21 and I spent the whole of my summer term not reading the Aeneid, not caring about the Paston letters and not revising W B Yeats, but writing to any firm in the city I could find an address for asking for a job. I so wanted a wardrobe of chalk-stripe suits and red braces!

I wrote to money brokers, futures trading firms, lots of commodities brokers of course, and one Stock Exchange firm (already the Stock Exchange seemed quite an old fusty nineteenth century institution and not really the place for a young turk to be dealing in sad old imperial age companies' stock). The money brokers liked me, but they wouldn't give me a job because, they said, if we put a non-graduate onto the phones to American bankers with their liberal arts HNDs they would laugh at them.

The one stock exchange firm I had written to, a stock-jobbing firm called Pinchin Denny & Co, did have a scheme for taking on post A-level youngsters, and so in September 1985 I headed down to the big smoke with nowhere to live and a salary of £3,500 per year.

I was utterly miserable. It has clouded my image of London ever since. I used to get drunk for hours in the Bishop of Norwich, or the Long Room or some such, because all the people I knew in London were my co-workers and to go home and then go out to meet them later meant a 90 minute trip "home" to Wembley, and then probably another 90 minute trip out to Wimbledon or somewhere they lived. So it was far easier to get blotto before going home.

I remember, well, I don't actually, getting so drunk one night that I rode the Northern Line up and down all night until it dropped me off at High Barnet (I was trying to get to Balham where I had moved to share the most god-awful flea pit with two or three other young "blue-buttons" after my Wembley landlord had got pissed off with me abusing his hospitality) and I got sat next to some weirdo with a knife on the night bus back into town - apparently one of our settlement clerks had seen me on the tube about half eight somewhere near Tooting and had tried to wake me up to no avail!

I remember one night I was guardian of the company mobile phone. We were so sophisticated in those days there were these dodgy geezers who sought to put one over on us jobbers who dealt in stocks that had dual listings in London and New York (my "pitch" was chemicals so we had lots of them - ICI, Glaxo, Beechams - remember them?) by "arbitraging". They traded shares from us out of hours when we couldn't see what prices were being made inn New York and what the exchange rates were doing - and flogging them again as "ADRs" in New York - this was even before those Reuters pagers that would give you stock tickers and forex prices. Some Ozzie guys from Smith Brothers saw me with the phone and decided to have some fun with me. They wanted to borrow the phone to make a quick call. The phone bill for three minutes to Australia was more than my pitch's entire book profit for the day and left the four kilo battery with about ten minutes talk time left on it!

Anyway, in April 2006, Morgan Grenfell (remember them?) took over Pinchin Denny in preparation for full deregulation in the October, and gave us blue buttons a thousand pounds raise to go with our yello buttons. I was still utterly depressed, so now was a good time I thought to move back home. At least I could live with mum for free in Glasgow and there were some good brokers there I could join, and I got a job with Laing & Cruickshank's Glasgow office.

If memory serves, the day of Big Bang happened to coincide with the closing date for applications for the British Gas privatisation issue and Laing & Cruickshank flew me down to London with a huge bag of application forms to get them into the Midland Bank (remember them?) in time for the close. And I decided to go and see my old Pinchin Denny colleagues on the Stock Exchange floor (they remained on the floor for a while which was bizarre - all the brokers had gone home to their offices and Chinese walls while most of the jobbers tried to do screen trading on the floor itself - well it did work in Glasgow!).

Several had moved firms. It was a year of lots of moves. Staff, whole teams, were poached as the new corproate owners of Stock Exchange member firms tried to build up their presence, and of course salaries had taken off. The guys I left six months earlier on £4,500 were now on £20,000 plus (at nineteen years old remember). Several had got flash company cars as golden hellos and so on (though nobody, but nobody ever drove to work in the city that I can remmeber!). And I had taken a small cut to go and live at home and was still on £4,000.

Oh well. I could have retired by now I guess. As it is, it was 1998, I think, when I finally got up to twenty grand a year. Maybe my philanthropy would be easier if I had made myself a million by the time I was twenty. Maybe I would just be one of those rather arrogant loadsa money ("I could buy and sell you before breakfast") types. Maybe I could be Tory shadow chancellor by now...:) (One of my colleagues from that 1985 Pinchin Denny intake, a chap called Tom Harris, did stand against Jenny Tonge I think in 2001, having been a Wandsworth Tory councillor for a while already I think)

The worst decision of my life? I don't think so. But it would probably have been nice to have an Oxford degree and a few million quid stashed away somewhere.

I had the repeat of that "Great Global Warming Swindle" on in the background last night. I didn't really watch it last week when it was on, and I only caught bits of it again last night (I know - I should turn the thing off if I'm not really watching it!). But there was one bit in particular, towards the end, with which I agreed, and whicih has been a bee in my bonnet for a long time.

It was not about the science. It was about social and development policy towards the developing/undeveloped world. All too often, the point was made, the developing world is sitting on piles of natural wealth and energy sources we want to use. We happily take it from them, but then tell them they shouldn't be using those same resources because they'll destroy the planet, as if somehow we are not.

But assuming we accept that humanity is causing global warming (even as the scientists on that program seemed not to be), one of the biggest factors in that has been the rampant replication of that Gaia destroying super-virus, homo sapiens, over the past few decades in particular. Chris Huhne made the point at a talk of his I heard in October that the global population growth is a big part of the problem, and that economic development was a way to reduce it.

Yet "The Great Global Warming Swindle" sounded about right when it said that we seemed to be saying that because of the potential to increase global warming we didn't really actually want those billions of people to develop their way out of the economic strife that tends to make people recoil to the security of breeding lots of children. Or at least we are putting massive obstacles in the way of such development.

Which brings me to my idea...that we should put the Commonwealth, far more so than either Europe or transatlantic polity, at the core of our foreign and international development policy for the twenty-first century. Nearly sixty years ago, Churchill suggested that Britain's post-war role in the world ought to be as a link between Europe, America and the Commonwealth. We seem to have put a lot of emphasis on the former two, but for a variety of reasons seem to have quietly dropped the latter.

Yes, the intervening decades have seen many upheavals of independence from Empire and those newly "emancipated" nations struggling and jostling to find their position in the world. But let's face it, we are only where we are because of them. Because of the way we colonised them and took from them what we wanted, what would make us materially rich.

The Commonwealth could be a model, modern community of nations, with members from every continent and from every stratum of economic development on the planet, from the very richest to the very poorest, working together under a common aim of redistributing the common wealth within it to ensure that all its peoples attain their full potential.

And not only for ecological ends, but also for global security ends. Just as it appears that the underprivileged on urban sink estates are more likely to drift into criminality (I know, that sounds so patronisingly Victorian but I hope you get what I mean), so those whole nations and peoples that see the imbalances in the world's wealth, and, moreoever believe resentfully that they are poor because we are rich, and that we have taken our riches from them over decades and centuries, are potentially more likely to want easy ways, such as nuclear weapons, to punch above their weight in the world.

So, let's have at it - without it becoming another resented imperial venture, how can we put those nations to whom we owe so very much of our own successes at the heart of our economic development strategies and help them overleap the pains of industrialisation that could further jeopardise the planet and in the process give them the economic security they need to stop helter skelter population growth exacerbating the problems? Ironically, of course, if we heed the calls to reduce our carbon footprint, it is likely that we will set back the economic development of many of those same countries because we are no longer willing to buy our Kenyan vegetables and so on. Our reduction is such consumption has to be replaced with other ways for those countries to develop. Imagine the great wealth of the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and the developing wealth of the likes of India and Malaysia, being brought to bear to address the abject poverty of the likes of Zimbabwe, Tanzania or Bangaladesh. We could create a beautiful common wealth together.

Sorry I've been quiet for a few days. I blame Praguetory for introducing me to "Second Life" one of the online virtual world social site type things (actually from what I can see a "MOO" for those of you who may remember Xerox Parc in the early nineties but with fancy graphics).

Anyway, today I sat in on a seminar led by Chris Huhne here at Brookes on the subject of "Politicians and Conservation: can politics deliver on climate change?". And I heard nearly the same talk again at a fund raising dinner for our European campaigns in the evening.

It was inspiring, but I'm sure you wouldn't think I was for real if I didn't say that it only went a small way towards addressing some of the issues. More on that perhaps a bit later.

But one thing in particular struck me. Chris was talking about where the ramifications of climate change are felt in government, and how teamwork on a nearly unprecedented scale (except perhaps in period of outright war like the national governments in WWII) between departments is so essential.

If, he said, we want to ensure our built environment is to the highest possible environmental quality we look to the Department of Communities and Local Government who set things like building and planning regulations. If we want to make an impact on aviation and motor vehicles we have to look to the Department of Transport. Flood defences, the natural environment and environmental treaties to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. To negotiate those treaties, you need the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to administer aid to developing countries to get them past the population and industrial smog of underdevelopment you have the Department for International Development. You need the Department for Education and Skills to get the message across to the many people who still aren't truly aware of their part in all this from the youngest age. And the mother of them all, to pay for it, you've got to have the Treasury team onside.

He could have added the Department of Health to deal with the soaring weather related illnesses, the Home Office to deal with the migration issues and in the worst case scenarios to deal with law and order issues related to shortages and Work and Pensions to deal with issues like fuel poverty.

Chris's case was, of course, that the Lib Dems, of the major parties, are the only one who has all the relevant shadow teams onside with this agenda. But I couldn't help wondering throughout, that if what is at stake is the survival of between about a sixth and a third of the world's species and the biggest potential threat to humanity's wellbeing should we not have, as one of the "great offices of state", at least as important as the Home Office, the Treasury and the Foreign Office, A secretary of State for the Survival of Species with an overarching brief to bring all of these necessary players into line.

Instead, that is, of putting farm payments and flood defences in the same budget and calling it "environment".