I think I actually wrote it in one of my poems is that my decline has been the making of me - I forget how I put it. Yeah, simply more reflective. I haven't got the excuse of moving forward just on impulse anymore, which I did, I think, for a long, long time.

That everything happens for a reason.

Now, what did I learn from it? I learned that there were people, mostly in the other party, who believe in free trade but didn’t really believe in doing anything for people who lost jobs. That is, every trade deal produces winners and losers, so this was going to work for us in a lot of ways because the Mexicans had much higher tariffs than we did. And because, if you’re a wealthy country, the jobs trade creates pay above the average wage, and often the jobs that are lost pay below. But it’s always assumed that all those people will be retrained and that there will be incentives to invest within driving distance of where they live to create new jobs. And we lost the Congress in ‘94, and I couldn’t get the money, and there was no interest in it until my last year as president when we passed something called the New Markets Initiative. So if I had it to do again, I’d get the money on the front end, and I’d say, “No, no, no, no. I need more money to help the people who will lose the jobs.” I just assumed, I think probably because I had — the Congress was the majority of our party, and also because the people that were for NAFTA, I couldn’t imagine that they wouldn’t want to help the people that wouldn’t be winners.

Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – I think that’s true.

I find it difficult to sit still.

After losing my mum still managing to finish drama school, because that was really difficult. I lost her in the first year.

In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.

A really bad habit of eating sweets before I go to sleep.

In order to raise money to pay for myself to go to the National Youth Theatre, I performed a medley of my drama school speeches and some songs for my entire school. Considering I can’t sing, this was terrible. I did U Remind Me by Usher and Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. They paid £2 each – basically, to laugh at me.

I was a happy kid. I had quite a small life: I grew up in Walthamstow and didn’t really leave east London. I didn’t go to the South Bank for the first time until I was 18 years old.