Trusting that "no more" moment

Simon Hoggart of The Guardian is my favourite diarist, and he provides further delight today with a piece headed "Vote Labour? Don't bet on it" The flavour is enhanced if you know that Simon is also the Parliamentary sketch writer for his paper, and has toiled for years in the corridors of politics. This isn't outsider sniping. Simon writes:

What's the point at which you decided you couldn't stand this lot any more? For many people Iraq was the tipping point - if not the war then the revelation of all that faked, tweaked and tarted up intelligence. For others it will have been something smaller: Bernie Ecclestone's million quid, or top-up fees, or Peter Mandelson.
I guess for me it's been the decision to loosen the laws on gambling, so that every one of our cash-strapped cities can now be bribed to accept a vast casino, designed to suck money from those who can't afford it and ship it back to the US or offshore havens.

The second thought was that we probably all have "no more moments" which may not be rational. but lead to a change of belief or direction at the time or later. One of mine occurred when I was a young journalist writing about London planning for the Evening Standard with, I hoped, a commitment to opening up some understanding between politicians and readers on the big issues of the day. Back in the 1970s it was plans for motorways, destruction of historic buildings, homelessness, the ravages of property speculation... so not much has changed, and I'm not sure how much good I did.
Anyway, one early morning the newsdesk dug me out of bed with a call sending me to doorstep the newly-appointed Secretary of State for the Environment, Peter Shore, and ask him what he was going to do about the development of the then-derelict Docklands. I explained to my colleagues that I doubted if the Secretary of State would have formulated a policy before breakfast on his first day, but that cut no ice. Mr Shore was very courteous in his dressing gown, I got something for the first edition - but left feeling that this wasn't a good way for a specialist writer to start a relationship with a politician, and a hunch I was probably going to be asked to do far worse in future.
I'm not sure I made a decision then that reporting wasn't going to be my life's work - or whether it became one of those post hoc justifications by which we may later rationalise changes of direction.
Probably I was being rather precious.... but sometimes you have to heed that moment, however trivial it seems, when heart over-rules head, emotion impacts on rationality. Even if it wasn't quite the way you remember it, even if the event was apparently trivial, there was probably something else going on that tipped the balance.
And as for journalism, it is certainly a much less comfortable place than it was in the 1970s, so double plaudits to Simon for maintaining his authentic voice.