My guide to liberals

Last Saturday I was making my way across the road from St Pancras to King’s Cross when I noticed a large bearded man blundering towards me, dodging the traffic, with a look of great urgency on his face. Assuming he was one of the 78 per cent of people in the capital who are mentally ill, I continued on my way with my head down – but he caught me up and said, with some force: ‘Left-wingers are NOT liberal!’ And then repeated it, even louder. It seemed a somewhat random statement to risk getting mown down by a bus for – a bit as if he’d said: ‘Herons are NOT waterfowl.’ But by the same token he didn’t issue his statement with anger – he delivered it with a smile, as if he were lecturing an idiot nephew.

I assume he was a Spectator reader. Over the past 20 years there has been a sizeable tranche of obdurate, older and usually male readers who greatly object to me using the term ‘liberal’ as if it were an insult, to be directed at the people who foist upon us all manner of right-on, reason-defying idiocies. The objectors fall into two broad categories (which are of course linked). There are those who consider themselves the heirs to the Whigs and those who consider themselves the heirs to Margaret Thatcher. Classical Liberals, I suppose, in short. Tolerant, laissez-faire, free market, small state, often Little Englanders, in the nicest possible way. But what these undoubtedly fine people do not realise is firstly that language is transformational and that ‘liberal’ no longer really means what they want it to mean – time has moved on. Time has taken their ideology around the back of KFC and given it a right good seeing to, to the extent that it is no longer recognisable.