Eight reasons why I know I’m a Conservative

‘Why don’t you just join the Liberal Democrats?’ If I’ve heard that once in the past couple of years I’ve heard it a hundred times. In online posts beneath my Times column, in public debates or private conversations, the question is sometimes a genuinely puzzled enquiry but more often an implied: ‘What the hell are you doing posing as a Tory?’

It’s all about Brexit, of course: the questioner’s assumption being that, strip from a Conservative the ambition that Britain should leave the European Union, and there remains nothing important to distinguish him or her from a Liberal Democrat. The assumption is part of the poisonous modern heresy that leaving the EU is so much the biggest issue of our day that little else — the survival of the Union, the state of our national finances, the avoidance of economic recession — matters. I know Leavers who, assured that Brexit depended on it, would give sympathetic attention to proposals for the Slaughter of the First-Born.