Inside my local nuclear bunker the old fears suddenly seem comical

Whenever I read of a great wave of public alarm,’ my grandfather used to say as he peered over the top of his Daily Telegraph, ‘I am gripped by a massive calm.’

I do not know what Grandad thought of the nuclear shadow said to be hanging over us through the Sixties and Seventies; indeed, I do not know what I think myself. As a young Tory I did share the alarm. More recently the questions asked by Andrew Alexander, the Daily Mail’s right-wing columnist, about the assumed imminence of a nuclear threat during the Cold War, have reopened more minds than mine. In place of ‘nuclear’, I have just typed ‘unclear’. Perhaps my unconscious mind is trying to tell me something.

But alarm was real at the time. I cannot count the number of debates, speeches and arguments I entered as the Conservative MP for West Derbyshire to make Margaret Thatcher’s government’s case for a high state of readiness.