Diary – 22 May 2010

The last election in which I voted was that of 1997. On Blair’s brave glad morning I flew to Edinburgh for something, and as we touched down the intercom said, ‘Welcome to Scotland, a Tory-free zone.’ I thought — not a good thing for the national airline to be taking sides. On the way back I ran into Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was looking bloodily unbowed from an attempt to wrest Kirkcaldy from Lewis Moonie. Now he has made the House, and good luck to him. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford he was very good at organising Thatcherite events, which was where we met. Back then — 1988 or so — there was a clear split among the Thatcherites between the Enlightenment and the Romantics, between people such as Kenneth Baker who would have done everything by pie-chart and people such as Norman Tebbit who probably wishes, like me, that nothing — and I mean nothing — had been changed in England since 1 January 1955.