"Talking to Cosmos, Cox said he said he was prompted in his thinking by several factors, including rediscovering the political activism of Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer, and “the failure of an entire generation of politicians” over the issue of Brexit.
He also remembered being on a television discussion program with Michael Portillo, a one-time UK Conservative cabinet minister. Cox had been lamenting the lack of intellectual rigour among serving parliamentarians, and Portillo suddenly took him to task.
“He said to me, well, just stand for parliament then,” Cox recalls."