Am I a Rubber Dinghy?

I accept that the title of this posting sounds like one of those Radio 4 programmes about Psychiatry, or the title of a painting by that fascinating Belgian, Rene Magritte.

But actually it is a reference to an attack on me by Tim Montgomerie, of 'Conservative Home', which readers can find here. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/majority_conservatism/2012/11/trust-in-polling-not-punditry.html#idc-container

Alas, I lack the facilities to retaliate with a drawing of the Tory party as a foundering tramp steamer, streaked with rust and very low in the water as its captain stands, wreathed in beatific smiles and apparently wholly unware of the ominous sloshing and gurgling from below, , on the bridge, (perhaps marrying two men as he keeps one languid hand on the wheel), while the crew and passengers either plunge overboard in despair or stand shivering on the bulwarks, trying to persuade themselves that the poor old bark will reach port one day.

 

Of course, Mr Montgomerie has failed to register, as so many Tory loyalists do, that I am way ahead of him. I understood long ago what reality will make clear to him in 2015 - the Tory Party is finished and cannot be saved. The only question is what we should do about that.

 

A summary of my position can still be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

 

A Response to Conservative Home and its contributors

The Conservative Home Tory Diary site recently suggested that a series of Conservative policies might persuade me to vote Tory after all. This provoked a number of comments from the site's readers, several of them hostile to me. Here's my reply. Unusually for any posting by me here, it contains links. This is because it was written primarily fro the Conservative Home site. I shan't do this here on a regular basis.

Tim Montgomerie’s ‘Fifteen reasons why even Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer should vote Conservative’ produced an interesting response from readers on Conservative Home, and Tim has kindly allowed me to reply – both to the posting and the reader response.

First, after many years of being so hated by New Labour that they tried to slam the doors of the 1997 Blair Manifesto press conference in my face (‘It’s full!’, they lied ‘You can’t come in!’) it is rather amusing to be just as loathed by the Modern Conservatives, as I believe they will come to be known. And to be loathed for more or less the same reasons – namely that a fraud is being perpetrated on the public and those involved don't want to risk anyone noticing.

When Mr Cameron announced his Lisbon climb-down a few weeks ago, my attempts to ask the Conservative leader a question (I raised my hand at the beginning, and was in the front row) were ignored, just as my attempts to question Mr Blair were ignored in the 1997 and 2001 elections (I don't think I could be bothered to ask in 2005). Likewise he tried quite hard to ignore my question to him when he discussed his very generous expenses with an audience in his constituency, initially shaking his head to indicate that I oughtn't to be asking a question at all at such an occasion, but in the end it was more embarrassing to ignore my lone raised hand than to take the question. He is indeed the heir to Blair, in many more ways than one.

The tone of many of the comments on me from many (though happily not all) this site’s readers is gratifyingly rude. I suspect most of these virulent critics don't actually read what I write, because (like children who won't try a new dish) they already know they don't like me. And I likewise suspect that they haven't read my books, only hostile and defamatory reviews of them. Well, all right, not everyone is keen on me. So let me concede, for the sake of argument, that I have no sense of humour at all; that I am personally vile, of hideous aspect; that children, small furry animals and songbirds flee from my presence; that flowers wither when I enter a room, that I sleep in a vault upon a bed of earth and feast on the blood of virgins.

(So how, by the way, can anyone possibly confuse me with the handsome and loveable Peter Oborne, perhaps the last specimen of the true English gentleman outside captivity? You may well ask).

But despite all my personal drawbacks, the question remains: ‘Am I right in thinking that David Cameron is so interested in office, and so lacking in conservative principle, that he doesn't much care what he says to obtain office, or what he does if and when he gets it. And am I right in thinking that the Conservative Party is no longer a reasonable compromise between differing allies, but an impossible coalition of opposites which is only kept alive by state subsidies and millionaire donors?

Tim thinks my concerns may be overcome by the things he lists. Well, I shall deal with this catalogue in a moment. But first, those who want the deep reasons for my dissent from Cameroon Toryism are invited to study them here:

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

And if they wish to go deeper, may I suggest that they take a look at my recent book ‘The Broken Compass’, unreviewed by almost any Conservative publication, including several that have reviewed my previous books, though Michael Gove - almost the only Cameroon interested in debate or thought - said of it in The Times : ‘This book has some passages of quite brilliant writing.’

And let me also deal with the charge made against me by so many Tory loyalists who have no other argument, that I am some sort of Trotskyite sleeper. This charge is seriously advanced by people who ought to know better. Edward Vaizey MP seems to be the origin of this peculiar idea. He expressed it on Telegraph TV in an item called ‘Right On’ in spring 2008, recorded on the Iain Dale blog on or about 6th April that year:

http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2008/04/ed-vaizey-slams-simon-heffer-as-marxist.html

Though it may possibly have been an attempt at stand-up comedy, Mr Vaizey seems to be being serious in this clip, in which he says:’I never fail to read Simon Heffer’s column. I've suddenly realised that Simon is a Marxist because his column is exactly the same as Peter Hitchens, who we all know is a former Marxist, and I think they are subversive left-wing sleepers who are trying to undermine a future Conservative government and that worries me…’ I have challenged him about this in person, and twice since e-mailed him at the House of Commons to ask him to go into more detail, but he has yet to reply.

As it happens, I stopped being a Marxist when Mr Vaizey was seven years old. Let me put it another way. I have been a non-Marxist, and an active opponent of Marxism, for far longer than Mr Vaizey has been a grown-up. Since then I have spent much of my time experiencing at first hand and close quarters things far too few Tories know anything about at all - the British Labour and Trades Union movement, the Eastern European nations under Communism, and the USSR itself, where I lived with my family. I have also lived in the USA, and continue to travel widely as a foreign reporter, most recently in China, Japan, Burma, South Africa, Iran and North Korea. I know in detail why I am not and could never again be any kind of socialist, let alone a Marxist or Trotskyist. Any time Mr Vaizey wishes to discuss this suggestion with me, I am ready to do so, preferably in front of an audience.

But one thing I will say. The goals which revolutionary Marxists of my generation sought – a radical reordering of the relations between the sexes, a weakening of the married family, a general moral, cultural and social revolution, the destruction of the taboos against abortion, illegitimacy and divorce, egalitarian education, the abolition of frontiers and of nation states, the end of restrictions on immigration and the withering away of national borders, the sociological approach to crime as opposed to the belief that wrongdoing was an act of free will that deserved punishment, the infiltration of the media, the schools and universities by radical and revolutionary ideas about history and society, the dismantling of the canon of literature and of conservative attitudes towards history, the general denigration of the British Empire, the demolition of the idea that education was a passing on of accepted knowledge, and so of the idea that teachers are figures of authority - are now the policies of the establishment and so the policies of the Modern Conservative party - despite occasional sops - of the sort listed by Tim - offered to conservative thinkers.

My fellow-revolutionaries – from whom I broke and who hate me like poison as a traitor to my generation - entered the media, the law, the education system and the civil service in their thousands when the sixties ended, intent on pursuing these aims. And as Gerry Adams used to say of the IRA ‘They haven’t gone away, you know’. The number of ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists at the very top of the Labour Party - who unlike me will not discuss their political pasts and also unlike me try to hide them - is extraordinarily large. These are for the most part not Old Labour socialists of the Clause Four trade union and nationalisation sort, but 'modern' enthusiasts for 'New Labour', which has many intellectual links with the current known as Euro-Communism , which used to coalesce round such publications as 'Marxism Today' and then migrated into the think tanks which swarmed around Mr Blair, and now swarm round Mr Cameron, who has pretty much accepted the Blair revolution as the price of establishment and BBC approval. See what I'm suggesting here?

Maynard Keynes once commented that politicians were generally the unconscious slaves of some defunct economist. They are also – especially Tories who know nothing of the Left - slaves of defunct social and political thinkers.

When Theresa May favours all-women shortlists, when David Cameron accedes to Lisbon and panders to the Green movement, when David Willetts adopts the language of the enemy as he declares that the alleged but non-existent ‘war against single mothers is over’, when all of them knuckle under to the idea that ‘Human Rights’ should be the supreme arbiter of what is right and wrong, they are all the unknowing followers of Antonio Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the cardboard deities of the Sixties New Left revolution, not to mention discredited sex-gurus such as Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey, whose bogus ideas and dud 'research' are still widely revered on the Left, and among those unconsciously influenced by the Left.

Most of the rest of their policies, especially on welfare and crime, are lifted straight from the ideas of the Fabian society, which has sought for more than a century to bring about socialism by gradual change rather than revolution. And the Tory elite are so contemptuous of ideas, and so ignorant of socialism that they don’t even realise it. That is why, in government after government, they concede enormous changes imposed by the left, not grasping that by doing so they are undermining their own basis of support and their own existence.

Unlike them, I know what the Left want, what they think and what they say in private when they think nobody is listening. And it grieves me greatly to see a supposedly conservative party doing their bidding and following their ideas. I'm not denying the right of people to argue and work for left-wing radical change. I am questioning the morality of doing so while pretending to the voters that they are a 'conservative party'. And I am suggesting that conservatives need a party which is actually conservative, and that the Tory Party's continuing existence is the greatest obstacle to the creation of such a party.

I might add that one of the chief vehicles for spreading and enforcing this PC radical rubbish is the European Union, whose incessant directives lie behind much of the compulsory political correctness( known as 'Equality and Diversity') which infects our public life - and leads to the increasing marginalisation of the Christian religion. It is absolutely unsurprising to me that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Dany le Rouge’ of the May 1968 events in France, is now a prominent Euro-MP and enthusiast for the Lisbon treaty, or that Joschka Fischer, a prominent street revolutionary of the period, became the Green foreign minister of the German Federal Republic.

The Tory Party's refusal to accept that Britain must leave the EU if it is to have any sort of independent, non-liberal future is one of the many reasons why I think the party is finished, and ought to be discarded by serious patriotic conservatives. The party's dishonest, have-it-both-ways position is encapsulated in Mr Cameron's tricky pretence that he opposed Lisbon, when he must surely have realised that it would be ratified before he had any influence over it.

I am told that I should work within the Tory party for change. How? Even if one had any belief that one could work for change, how would one do so? When I was a member of the Tory Party, I could discover no mechanism through which I or anyone else could campaign for policy change. The party is now enormously centralised, as the Howard Flight affair, and the current revolting shortlist procedures emphasise. All was and is settled by cliques and elites clustered around the leader's office. When I tried to use the privileged access that was available to me through Fleet Street, privately to press conservative ideas, as expressed in my books, on crime, education or the family, on Conservative politicians, I was met with a lofty Oxbridge scorn. I did not come to my current position without trying everything else I could think of.

Now, to the list.

An end to taxpayer subsidy of the trade union movement
Abolishing ID cards
An annual cap on immigration from outside the EU
An independent medical examination of every incapacity benefit claimant
A recognition of marriage in the tax system
Abolishing regional government
Replacement of the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights
Moving public sector job advertising away from The Guardian and on to the internet
The abolition of inheritance tax for all but millionaires
The protection of private schools from interference from the Charity Commission
Freezing the BBC licence fee
A 10% reduction in the number of MPs
The repeal of the ban on foxhunting
Full renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent
A free vote on reducing the time limit for abortion

What a strange catalogue this is. Of course the plan to abolish identity cards is good. I like to think that some years back, in the days of Michael Howard, I helped to persuade the Tory Party to abandon this horrible idea. I am viscerally against it. But it is not by itself enough to overcome the following difficulty, especially given the devaluation of Tory pledges by Mr Cameron's shifty performance on the EU and the marriage tax break. Most of the rest are minor sops hurled in various directions to try to maintain the Tory Party's unsustainable coalition between social liberal, economic liberals, foreign-policy neo-conservatives, rural campaigners, and a dwindling and confused rump of patriotic social conservatives. The basic thrust of the Cameron Modern Conservatives does not challenge the social democratic consensus of the British and EU establishment, or propose to reverse the damage done over many years buy such governments. A Cameron government is no threat to that consensus, and acknowledges that left-wing policies are irreversible. That's why the initially heartening pledge on the Charity Commission does so little for me. When an openly-declared social democratic government returns, as it will, the squeeze on the independent schools will resume where it left off. Meanwhile, there will have been no attempt to restore the grammar schools, the only effective measure for restoring rigour to state education.

Oh, and leaving aside the obligation to enforce the ECHR as long as we are EU members, we already have a Bill of Rights, which does what such documents ought to do - and restricts the power of the state. We would do well to pay more attention to it. But I am not sure I would trust the Tory front bench, many of them neo-conservative 'war on terror' types, to draw up a replacement.

This approaching election is a unique opportunity for genuine conservatives. The Tory Party cannot and should not survive a fourth general election failure. It will be ages before such conditions exist again. In our two party system, the Tory Party's failure and resulting collapse and split would provide the opportunity to create a real conservative formation, which could throw New Labour into the sea, not least by winning the votes of the patriotic, conservative working class so comprehensively abandoned by Labour.

What have we to lose? A Cameron government would be so similar to a Blair government that it would be very hard to tell the difference in a poor light, and those who had campaigned for such a government would then be compelled, with sinking hearts, to waste their energies defending it from criticisms they knew to be just.

It is blithering nonsense to imagine that the Blairites or the Brownites will be 'punished' by being removed from office. They are longing for the chance to run off and feather their nests, with memoirs, consultancies and speechmaking. It would be far harder for them, and far less lucrative, if they were left to try to clear up the mess they had made, while the people of Britain used the time to form a resistance movement that would throw New Labour into the sea at the next election, and then actually reverse the damage they have done, instead of feebly managing a socialist, PC welfare state under EU rule, as the Cameroons plan to do.

So no thanks, Tim. No serious, thoughtful conservative should give his vote to the Cameron project. We have seen in this week's swervings and zig-zags on marriage a pretty good dress rehearsal of what a Cameron government would be like in practice - shifty, unprincipled and not very competent either. The Tory Party doesn't do what it says on the tin. If it were a consumer product, nobody would buy it. And I don't buy it either.

A challenge to the Tory diehards

I am interested by the fact that my opponents, on the 'Don't Vote Tory' issue never actually argue about the central point. They just pretend it isn't there. Could one of them please try, just once, to address the issue?

I'm told that my efforts helped to bring about a Tory defeat in 2005(if only) resulting in 'the shower we have now.’ Does he think a Michael Howard government would have been substantially different from what we have now? Why? This wiseacre parrots the cry of the loyalist down the ages ‘Do you really want another 5 years of Labour?’
He also hides behind a silly name which ('SickofSpin') is highly inappropriate, since he is a sad victim of spin, believing the crudest propaganda of the Tories.

About 80% of my argument rests on the following contention:

That if the Tories win, we will get Liberal leftist government as we have done, in all important respects under every Tory government since the war. The country will continue to bankrupt itself to maintain a work-destroying welfare state; it will continue to permit limitless mass immigration; it will continue to use the schools as an engine for egalitarianism; it will continue to pursue the anti-Christian, anti-marriage agenda of political correctness; it will continue to pursue the cultural revolution against tradition and conservative institutions; it will continue to weaken criminal justice, in the belief that crime is a social disease rather than a manifestation of unrestrained wickedness. It will continue to surrender its sovereignty to a foreign power.

Therefore, if the Tories win, or if Labour win, we will get 'another five years of Labour.' And another five years after that; and another five years after that; because until the cycle of openly socialist Labour and covertly socialist Tory government is broken, that is what you will get. My question to Mr 'SickofSpin' is ‘Do you want another 20 years of Labour?’ In fact ‘Do you want Britain to have socialist governments forever?’ For that is the effect of what you propose. How can anyone, after the last 50 years, and the behaviour of Mr Cameron himself, still harbour any serious illusions about the Tory Party? I'd really like to know. My question to ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’ is similar :Why will Labour be 'manifestly worse' than a Cameron government? Details required. Why is Labour the worse of two evils, when a Labour victory (or a Tory failure) might actually trigger real change, whereas a Labour defeat or Tory victory will leave us as described above?

Alternatively, let him explain, with evidence and details, what substantive and non-negotiable differences (no vague slogans please, details) will distinguish a Cameron government from a Brown one, or a Blair one, or a Major one, or a Macmillan one? I'd be unsurprised to learn that both these contributors voted for Anthony Blair. If Mr Cameron can fool them, then Mr Blair probably could too.

D.Smith is a victim of conventional wisdom. New Labour is considerably to the Left of Old Labour. Its acceptance of economic liberalism (which deluded the ill-informed into thinking it had accepted conservatism) allowed it to pursue constitutional and moral revolution on a scale it had not previously dared to attempt.

To the ludicrously-disguised 'Lickyalips,' I note that I am asked for advice on how to vote, and give it. I do not 'tell' anyone how to vote. I have no such power, and the only decision I can make is my own. This is a foolish, thoughtless intervention and I am not surprised its author hides behind a puerile false name.

How many people do I think I'm talking to? No idea. I just hope it's enough, and that enough of them listen. I can only do what I can do. I do write a column for the Mail on Sunday, as well as this blog.

Those who want to see the back of Harriet Harman should realise that if the Tories win they will instead get Tory wimmin who support many of Ms Harman's ultra-feminist proposals. Why don't people get it about what and who the Tories are?

William Hague did not fight the 2001 election on a 'very right wing, socially conservative and anti-European manifesto.' This is a myth, frequently advanced by Cameroons. I challenge 'Josh' to produce his evidence. He wouldn't even commit his party to absolute unchanging opposition to Euro membership.

My views on devolution are accurately set out in the Wikipedia entry about me, in the 'foreign policy' section.

It was not I who drew attention to Jack Straw's Jewishness. It was Mr Stone. I was drawing attention to Mr Stone's curious interest in this unimportant fact.

Lesbians, blockages and the debate that needs to be had but nearly didn't happen

Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday

One of the most important subjects in British politics - and one of the most interesting - is the future of the Tory Party. Is it finished? Should it adopt the ideas of the liberal consensus? Should it continue to represent the views of conservative-minded voters even if this leads to it being derided and misrepresented in the liberal media?

Yet it is almost impossible to discuss these issues in many places. The near-universal assumption, among conventional commentators, is that David Cameron's changes are unquestionably good, that he is a breath of fresh air, and that the party is on the road to recovery.

You will very rarely hear any dissent from this view anywhere on British broadcasting or in much of the press either. The only doubt that is allowed to be expressed is the crass left-liberal belief that David Cameron and his supporters are really secret Thatcherites, concealing their tax-cutting teeth behind a false and painted smile.

And so, one effect of the Cameron change is that those who hold to conservative opinions on culture, morals, national independence and justice have been pushed even further towards the edge of the national table. I have long been used to getting the so-called 'Mussolini Seat' on TV and radio discussion programmes, where I sit on the far right of the platform (sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically).

But thanks to the Tory Party's urgent move to the liberal left, I find that my opinions are now treated as being beyond the frontier of civilised discussion. Although I am a constitutionalist and a supporter of the rule of law, I get a sense that the BBC now increasingly feels free to corral me in the outer darkness with the bigots. Even when I get on the air there's often a certain amount of amateur psychoanalysis, about how 'angry' I am, which is not applied to any opponents I might have. We'll see how this develops.

The important point here is that if the 'official' political parties declare that the 'centre ground' (defined as the narrow area within which they are prepared to permit disagreement) has moved substantially to the left (the effect of the Tory revolution) then more and more people are excluded from the 'centre ground' and offered submission and silence as their only option inside the democratic process. I fear the consequences of this.

But back to the great debate which was held in London on the Tory Party last week. The excellent organisation 'Intelligence Squared' did need to be persuaded at the beginning that it was worth discussing - but once they had agreed they moved with their usual skill. A motion was selected: "The Tory Party is no longer conservative". Two fine speakers were found to oppose it, my old friends Charles Moore and Michael Gove, both proper old-fashioned broad-minded people who can disagree in a civilised fashion. The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, I suspect rather gleefully, agreed to chair this falling-out among her foes.

The distinguished journalist Andrew Alexander agreed to speak alongside me. Tickets went on sale, and sold out so that all 800 seats were filled and people were calling up asking for late cancellations till shortly before the event began. I don't think this came from a desire to listen to me, but from a desire to hear a proper discussion of a near-taboo subject.

Now, this wasn't a squabble in an upstairs room in a pub, and the speakers weren't obscure. Yet apart from a cogent item on BBC Radio 4's 'World Tonight' and a thoughtful mention in the 'Sunday Times' by Minette Marrin (of which more later), the mainstream media didn't give it so much as a diary paragraph. The only independent account of it available was written by Graeme Archer for the ever-fascinating website 'Conservative Home' (part of its entry for Wednesday October 25). Mr Archer is no friend of mine, but I strongly recommend you to read his description of the event. He and 'Conservative Home' are to be commended for making the effort, which has led to an interesting discussion there.

One or two other rather fascinating things need to be recorded here. Andrew Alexander withdrew just two weeks before the debate, leaving us to try to find a replacement. This was astonishingly difficult, and I wish I could tell you some of the names of those who were approached and - though they didn't disagree with the motion itself - wouldn't do it. Hywel Williams, who did agree, then fell ill at the last minute and the delightful Jeremy O'Grady, who is in fact one of the chiefs of 'Intelligence Squared' stepped in with much grace and spoke very well. But I think it fair to say that Jeremy, while witty and eloquent, did not and could not speak from the viewpoint of a conservative-minded person abandoned by his party.

My own point (which Graeme Archer's account largely leaves out) was that it was quite understandable that a conservative party should accept changes brought about by its rivals - elements of the welfare state, for instance, and some other actions of the 1945-51 and even the 1964-70 Labour governments - though the Wilson era was actually the first real outing of 'New' ideological Labour, even if much of its work was done through supposedly 'Private' Bills.

I don't personally regard nationalisation as a left-right issue ( Charles I nationalised the Post Office, Neville Chamberlain nationalised electricity generation and I personally would renationalise the railways tomorrow if I could). Nor can I see why a conservative movement should object to all elements of a welfare state. A country should look after its poor people. The difficulties arise when you try to decide who benefits and who doesn't. There's also the question of how best to organise it, and whether national or local institutions work better.

But if that conservative movement accepts more fundamental changes - the surrender of national sovereignty to a foreign power, the removal of the concept of personal responsibility from the justice system, the advance of a cultural and moral revolution which destroys the fortresses of privacy and weakens marriage, then it is digging its own grave. The things it claims to defend will be destroyed irrevocably by such reforms. It will be reduced to governing a country whose external and internal politics are hostile to everything it officially stands for. It will be in office, but not in power.

I was the first person that evening to make the point that conservatism is a disposition, not a dogma - but I went on to say that the Labour Party, which in its first half-century was broadly patriotic and socially conservative - was now highly dogmatic and in the grip of culturally revolutionary ideologues. Such people cannot be effectively opposed by those who don't understand what they're up to.

Now, I have no idea what Charles and Michael expected me to say. I'm never entirely sure that my Tory critics have any argument that goes much deeper than 'Sit down, you're rocking the boat'.

And Michael, most regrettably, was held up unavoidably at the Commons for an important vote and didn't hear my opening speech. But I felt they didn't respond to these points at all. I was portrayed as an inflexible reactionary unwilling to countenance any change since the 1950s, which is exactly and specifically what I hadn't said and don't believe.

Actually I'm always portrayed in this way, part of the slithering slag-heap of deadening abuse and misrepresentation which the Left shovel on to their critics. Now I note the same criticism coming from people who were once my allies against the Left.

I loathed much about that time, as should be clear to anyone from my chapter comparing the funerals of Winston Churchill and Diana Spencer in 'The Abolition of Britain' in which I describe the dreary, dirty, unpleasantly austere, inconvenient way of life of the period, drawn from my own memory. But I also mention the good things we lost at the same time. This is the essential choice the conservative needs to make, distinguishing between change for the better and change for the worse, rather than welcoming all change as good, with the simpering joy of the undiscriminating 'progressive'.

And Michael sought to portray me as a sort of fanatic, much more in the tradition of Cromwell's Puritans than of Prince Rupert's cavaliers. Well, there’s some truth in this. I suspect Rupert's boys were all too much like the Bullingdon lot at Oxford, all booze and horses, not my sort (and not Michael's either - I suspect, they'd have chucked him into the nearest duckpond for belonging to the wrong class). I'm pretty certain that my West Country nonconformist ancestors would have been among the Ironsides, singing Psalms as they clove righteously through the dissipated, hungover Royalist ranks. But actually, I've always been torn by the Civil War and have never, since I first encountered that astonishing story aged around nine, been able to make up my mind between the Wrong but Romantic Cavaliers and the Right but Repulsive Roundheads. Hence my enthusiasm for the Glorious Revolution, when Cavalier squire and Ironside veteran made common cause against continental-style despotism and the sale of the country to foreign interests.

I simply didn't think the other side answered the charge. Minette Marrin rather agreed with me, although she couldn't bring herself to mention my name and referred to me as 'the other side ' as in "there were a lot of awkward questions from the other side that were left unanswered". She also quoted Charles as having said "trust is much more important than precisely what you are saying". This I completely disagree with and I am surprised to see such a man saying it.

I think this country could do with a Party which said very clearly what it meant to do, explained why and then did it. All this personal trust in telegenic individuals is too presidential to me, and leads to sad (and damaging) disappointment when the individual involved turns out to have the usual clay feet. I also think that people are getting sick of it.

I should also mention the joke that seems to have upset Graeme Archer. Actually, it was an attempt to sum up the problem in a parable, which will seem leaden when written down, but was appreciated by some of the audience. I don't guarantee it's word for word. Imagine, I said, that you discovered that your drains were blocked, and rang up an organisation we'll call Dyno-Bod to avoid any complaining letters about misuse of trademarks.

Within minutes, a van screeches to a halt outside. It's got 'DYNO-BOD' written on the side as usual but you notice it's painted bright pink rather than the fierce orange you're expecting. Never mind. It's a perfectly nice pink and organisations change their images. Then a young woman gets out. She's a Lesbian. How do you know she's a Lesbian? Because she's wearing a T-shirt saying "I'm a Lesbian. Have you got a problem with that?"

You invite her in and start explaining about the blockage, and ask her how long she thinks it will take to get rid of it. She replies "Get rid of it? Whatever do you mean? We don't get rid of blockages any more. We help you come to terms with them".

This seemed to sum up the Tory Party's attitude towards the many problems which voters once looked to it to help them solve, which is, more or less,' Can't you shut up? Mass immigration and crime and penal taxation are so over as subjects these days. Can't you just move on?' And it also mocks that party's embracing of political correctness, especially the 'A-list' encouragement of candidates who are openly homosexual, which is presented as tolerance but is in fact the acceptance of a controversial, unconservative radical equality agenda.

Well, my side lost, though we were not crushed and - in a parallel internet vote - we won. Did we lose the argument? I don't think so. Will it be debated again soon? I hope so. It certainly will be after the Tories lose the next election, and with even more vigour if they lose it as badly as I hope they do.

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