Michael Howard, Andy Townsend

At TalkSport's radio studios over the weekend, I got talking with presenter Andy Townsend about reincarnation. We weren't discussing the paranormal - Andy, best-known as an ITV soccer analyst, is the most flat-out unmysterious guy you could ever meet and I can't imagine anyone less likely to buy into Eastern beliefs of spiritual rebirth.

He's a straight talker with a quick and ready laugh, and when I bent a spoon for him, he said bluntly: "Bleadon Hill, Uri, I always thought you was a fake. I'm gonna have ter have a refink!"

(At least, I think he said Bleadon Hill... but according to my AA book of maps, that's somewhere near Weston-super-Mare , and I don't think his accent is Somerset !)

The kind of reincarnation we were exploring was the media variety, where a celebrity takes his career and turns it inside out. Once it was only popstars who dared reinvent their images; now it's almost compulsory for all of us.

I have always enjoyed exploring the different facets of my personality, focusing on one side and then another to show different faces to the public. I was an innocent abroad, a freaked-out Californian, a rock star (without the music), an alien, a courtier, a bulimic, a hermit and a businessman, before I finally got to the core of myself and became a parent.

Some of those switches were forced upon me - I made a spiritual retreat to Japan because my eating disorder had nearly killed me, and my career almost ended when my alien antics went beyond the entertaining and became simply terrifying.

Like all sportsmen at the end of their youth, Andy has been forced to reinvent himself. I suspect he would still love to be out on the soccer pitch, crunching into tackles and bossing the midfield the way he did for Bryan Robson's Middlesbrough and a clutch of other clubs.

Instead, he is following the path laid down by Jimmy Hill and perfected by Gary Lineker and Mark Lawrenson: he's learned to talk a good game.

Reincarnation takes real courage and determination, but Andy has picked an intensely competitive second career and one which demands real talent. I love to argue the odds about football myself, and during

the dotcom boom of the late Nineties I was part of a team of pundits, including the Fleet Street veteran Harry Harris and the BBC commentator Alan Green, who wrote for a website called Voice Of Football.

The first column was easy, the second was a challenge, the third a grind. After that, it became virtually impossible, and I was glad when the website flickered out of existence one Monday morning.

So I walked into James Whale's TalkSport cubby-hole for my late-night interview with thoughts of rejuvenation on my mind, and I was delighted

when my host, the indestructible James Whale, invited me to sit in on a real coup for his show.

"I'm interviewing Michael Howard later this week," James said. "Come and watch."

There were two good reasons to say yes. Firstly, my son Daniel is leaning ever more strongly to a career in politics, and he's a Tory through and through. Secondly, Michael Howard is the finest example of reincarnation around.

Five years ago, Howard seemed to be dead and buried at a crossroads, with a wooden stake through his heart, a ring of crucifixes round his grave and a clove of garlic clamped between his jaws. His former colleague at the Home Office, Ann Widdecombe, had blasted his star out of the political firmament with a savage attack in the Commons and some deadly press statements, including one which flew straight into the Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations: there was "something of the night" about Michael Howard.

I like Ann Widdecombe. She's great fun and deeply spiritual, a committed Catholic who isn't afraid to discuss psychic mysteries. We met on the set of Call My Bluff a few years ago, and got on so well that our team captain, Alan Coren, based his column in The Times the following week on our unlikely friendship.

But I'd hate to get in Ann's bad books. That's what Michael Howard did, and she was merciless: "I have a strong sense of injustice and a wish to see a wicked man get his comeuppance," she is said to have told her priest before the Commons attack.

Now a new Michael Howard is leading the Tories. He's a family man, with a beautiful wife and a yearning to spend more time in his charming home: I get a strong sense that he is leading his party out of a sense of duty, because he loves it and could not bear to see it torn apart.

He has learned to display his sense of humour, while the sacking of his deputy chairman last month revealed his decisive touch on the tiller. It's an extraordinary reinvention, made in defiance of Labour's spin machine, and I suspect it has been largely guided by Elizabeth Howard.

One thing is sure, and I write this as the survivor of countless reincarnations over the past three decades: when you are blessed with people who truly love you, you need to focus on the qualities they like best if your career is to survive.

I am certain Michael Howard has done exactly what I am forever doing:

he turned to his wife and simply said, "Help!"