Many years ago I saw the award-winning film, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. It was the story of how Ordinary People reacted to extraordinary circumstances, in this case a family tragedy.

In a feature I wrote for the Mail on Sunday recently I wrote of what it was like to be an ordinary woman trying to become an MP. Some readers suggested I was far from ordinary because of my job as a journalist and my contacts in the media world. This misses the point entirely.

In a sense we are all ordinary people who can behave in extraordinary ways depending on whether we are dealt a blow or bestowed a boon.

I once interviewed Pam Warren the survivor of the Paddington Rail crash, who famously wore a plastic mask to help her scars heal. Her hands will never recover and her tendency to suffer flashbacks will always remain. She has become a motivational speaker: courageous and inspiring. But she would agree with me that she is just an ordinary person.

In my job as a journalist I have met many extraordinary people, from the lorry driver from Rochdale who raised half a million pounds to fund his daughter’s cancer treatment to the widows of the New York fireman, but at heart they were all ordinary. My extraordinary good fortune was to meet them.

We need people who can rise to the challenge by behaving well. It doesn’t matter what their job is. Plenty of current MPs were ordinary people behaving badly what we need is ordinary people behaving well. What we need most of all is leaders behaving well. The best way to spot a leader is to look at who is following. On June 4 we will know.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009 at 15:56