“SO HOW ARE YOU getting on in the Labour Party, Quentin?" Or, alternatively or immediately afterwards, “How are your old Conservative Party colleagues treating you?”

I get asked these questions so often in the constituency at weekends that I thought the answers might be of general interest.

The Labour Party have given me the warmest welcome possible. They would wouldn’t they cynics might think. But actually it has been so obviously personally felt in so many cases that it has been very touching.

Of course I have always had friends in the Parliamentary Labour Party – and always had very friendly relations with Ian Selby, my opponent at the last general election, and with several Labour councillors. But I knew very few activists. At the Labour Party conference I met hundreds.

On the Conservative side, reaction has inevitably been mixed. Most Conservative colleagues are realistic and philosophical – they knew of my increasing differences with their party over the years, though none can have expected my decision in June. A surprising number, including some very prominent names, have congratulated me on my letter to David Cameron. Friends, in the constituency, as in Parliament, have remained friends.

Only two sets of people in the street (or in one case Grantham railway station) have come up to say hostile things. I long ago lost account of the number of people who have said kind and supportive things, including many people who until now have voted Conservative.

In the House, two former colleagues have made an issue, and one a scene. With both, I now have normal conversations.

My secretary says I am a much happier man since I took my difficult decision. No doubt she is right. It was a wonderful feeling on Wednesday when David Cameron was calling on Gordon Brown to abolish targets in the health service to be able to cheer for what I believed in. Of course, you cannot run a monopolistic organisation like the NHS effectively without targets. There is no competitive pressure to improve performance, so unless the NHS. is to become entirely producer orientated, targets must be imposed from the outside.

And next week, after the Lisbon Summit, instead of sitting silent and pained among a crowd of baying Europe haters, I shall be looking at them with equanimity and relief from the other side.