Twenty years ago this week, I was part of the launch of a new internet TV station. It only lasted a year, but it was a decade ahead of its time.

In the summer of 2006, I was approached by Tim Montgomerie and Stephan Shakespeare who wanted to set up a right of centre internet TV channel. Stephan had set up Yougov in the late 1990s alongside Nadhim Zahawi. Initially, I wrote a weekly column for them, for which I never got paid. Once they had decided they would become a polling company they floated on the stock market and asked if I would accept shares instead of payment. Those shares rapidly escalated in value and I stupidly cashed in. Far too early, as it turned out. Anyway, Stephan had made several million pounds and he had the resources to invest in this internet TV project, which was really the brainchild of Tim Montgomerie. Stephan had purchased a four storey rather dilapidated townhouse in Doughty Street in Bloomsbury, which in many ways was totally unsuited for a TV station and in completely the wrong location. We intended to stream four hours of television four nights a week with me, Tim and Donal Blaney hosting shows. Reading the press release 20 years on, it reads like a noughties launch of GB News.

I started work at the beginning of August. The house was literally a building site. John was in charge of overseeing the internal rebuilding and design, and had the unenviable – and impossible – task of ensuring everything was on schedule for an early October launch. The initial set design was ghastly and resembled a middle eastern bordello. The streaming technology was erratic to say the least. There was huge media interest in our launch week and we featured in various BBC shows as well as profiles in many of the national papers. People were intrigued. We had an enthusiastic group of young TV wannabes as producers and technical assistants. What we really needed was a couple of people who actually knew what they were doing. There were some hairy moments, and too many occasions when the three principals – Tim, Donal and me – clashed violently over the direction of the channel.

Ten days after launch, Tim walked out and disappeared off to America with no explanation. The rest of us carried on and started to produce some reasonably good content. The systems started working, schedules were kept to and we even started to enjoy it. I had two rotating co-presenters in Zoe-Anne Phillips and Renah Valeh, and we started attracting some quality guests. There were also some hilarious moments. On one evening I needed to go to the loo, so left Renah presenting on her own. Only one problem. The sound person forgot to mute my mic. And I wasn’t doing number ones. Plop. Plop, plop. The viewing public heard it all.

When Tim returned, he made some outstanding US style attack adverts with the filmmaker Murray Gough. Some people clutched their pearls in horror that such a genre should be introduced to the UK. We also distributed hand- held video cameras to 100 so-called citizen journalists, who were supposed to make films and then send them to us. The idea was good, but the execution wasn’t. This was in the days before smartphones and people were just not used to filming either themselves or other people. People also couldn’t watch our output on their phones because the technology hadn’t yet been invented.

Looking back the whole project was years ahead of its time and Tim Montgomerie was in many regards ahead of HIS time. He was a first mover in blogging, in foreseeing that people would want to view things in bitesized chunks, and in so many other ways. Tim would himself acknowledge that he wasn’t a good team player, but brilliant people often aren’t. That doesn’t make them bad people. He’s an original thinker and great writer and it is a tragedy that the Conservative party never found a proper role for him. It’s a scandal that he was never put into the House of Lords, but perhaps too often he went off the reservation and although the various party leaderships paid lip service to him, they saw him as trouble rather than an asset. They were consistently wrong.

Towards the end of 2007 it became clear that Stephan and Tim wanted to move in a different direction. They brought in Freddie Sayers as a business manager with seemingly few qualifications to do the job. He encountered a team of people who viewed him with huge suspicion. No one was quite sure what his remit was. It turned out that his remit was to shut down 18 Doughty Street and turn it into a news website called PoliticsHome. That was not what I signed up for, and I decided I wanted out, and a few weeks later quit. As did Donal Blaney. It was such a shame as it could have worked had it been given more time. But essentially, there was almost no income stream. The audience wasn’t big enough to generate advertising revenue and there was never any business plan or sales operation. I reckon Stephan had spent the best part of £1.2 million on the project, plus a similar amount renovating the property. I have no doubt he will have made that money back if he ever sells the building, but at some point he had to cut his losses. So another chapter, albeit a brief one, closed.

Extracted from HAVE I SAID TOO MUCH?