The thinking man’s trumpet

Britain’s pre-eminent conservative philosopher is rather muddy. I’ve seen him in London, tidy in yellow corduroy. In Wiltshire Roger Scruton is green and brown. Sundey Hill Farm, where he lives with his wife and their two young children, is a ‘rural consultancy’, a ‘meta-farm’ whose services include ‘log-cutting’ and ‘logic-chopping’. Scruton complains that he is too busy with the mental to do much manual labour, but this doesn’t stop him looking as though he’s been wrestling with a hedge.

As an undergraduate, in the shadow of his schoolteacher father, who detested the Conservatives, Roger Scruton was a ‘vague socialist’. Then, in 1968, he was in Paris, and what he witnessed there — as he describes it, the ‘antinomian emptiness’ of the student revolt — made him a conservative. He has written books on aesthetics, on music, on sexuality, on Kant, Spinoza and animal rights. But he made his name in 1979 with The Meaning of Conservatism, and his most successful books have all been on or around this theme.