This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcast to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Michael Cashman.

Baron Cashman of Limehouse in the London borough of Tower Hamlets is an actor, a politician, a writer, an activist, and a friend for many, many years when he became a member of the European Parliament.

Michael, your book, your memoir, one of them which came out last year is now coming out in paperback,

one of them from Albert Square to Parliament Square, from the benefit of our non-British listeners, Albert Square,

is a reference obviously to your role in the very successful BBC soap opera EastEnders.

This is a fascinating book and a very open book and a very

in many ways poignant book. And many things I learned about you from the book, which I did not

know before. One, for example, you were a successful playwright as well as an actor at the start

of your career, very much mentored, encouraged by the famous Alan Akebourne.

Secondly, you're also a successful stage actor as well as a TV and film actor.

And last but not least, at one point, you wanted to leave all that behind you and train as a doctor,

which I found absolutely a gobsmack. I learned that.

So we'll try and cover as much of that as possible.

I thought we start. This is obviously free-ranging conversation, Michael, about your role

along with others in co-founding Stonewall in 1989, I think I might have been saying. So could you

explain the backdrop to the creation of Stonewall or why then?

Of course, Paul, and it's lovely to see you. My 15 years in the European Parliament go down as something special. And I'm glad I've surprised you with some of the things

because otherwise what's the point of writing as one of my colleagues in the House of Lords said

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