I am also against the recent creation of a fifth province of the United Kingdom, Livingstonia, or ‘Greater London’. This sizeable Republic (for its elected head of state is really a mini-President, though he is called a mayor) subverts the whole shape of the British constitution, and creates a needless new power in the country. What London needs is small, efficient, truly local borough councils, not some grandiose and gargantuan Thing.

Much as I despise Thatcher I remember that under Blair and Brown’s watch far more people died in the wars they waged, services were privatised that Thatcher never dared to, the gap between rich and poor got wider than under Thatcher, the Thatcher anti-union laws stayed in place while the Union bosses continued to fund Labour, Legal Aid and civil liberties were trashed under Labour and Labour carried on selling Council homes and built hardly any. While we rightly loathe Thatcher,we would do well to remember what the scum in the Labour Party did to us all when they had the power to really make changes.

It’s clear from Zweig’s book that continental civilisation before 1914 had, in many ways, reached a level that it has yet to regain nearly a century later. The approved version these days is that war brought huge technological and social advance (the then French Ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, said after 1918 that Britain had undergone an actual revolution during the war, and this was certainly just as true in the 1939-45 war). But aren’t we inclined to see the ‘liberation’ of women from ‘domestic drudgery’ 9and their transfer to industrial and commercial drudgery)) as an unalloyed good, just as we tend to view universal suffrage as automatically wonderful, and the much-increased level of state intervention in daily life as broadly beneficial.

But were they? Did we take the right turning? Few blessings are unmixed, most come with curses. And the price we paid, in lives and health, for these revolutions, was colossal. Was it worth it?

The most urgent, modern Tory duty is to fight back against, to root out, the insidious identity politics of the post-1980s Left, and its consequent cultural manifestations. No simple government Act will change things, no counter-hegemony can be established in a single parliament. The fight to de-politicise the random, arbitrary facts of genetic life will require a lifetime of effort. Hoisting a woman on her party’s petard, because her mouth sometimes runs away from her: that’s a step in the wrong direction. That is playing, to be blunt, into the enemy’s hands, by accepting their rules of the game. Upon whom will the spotlight of the Two Minute Hate fall next?