Party conference season is a bit of a mystery for those of us who spend our time inhabited in the normal world. Three days where ostensibly sensible people remove themselves from life, spending thousands of pounds in the process, to listen to politicians telling them that the undoable is doable.

I wouldn’t pretend to live entirely in that normal world, having been at dozens of political party conferences over the last quarter century. In Harry Potter terms, party conferences are the Wizarding World and you, my readers, live in the muggle world. I am a half-blood.

I am being hard on members of political parties, of course. They are actually a very important part of the process of government. Without party members, there are no parties. Without parties, there is no ideological spine to government. Without an ideological spine to government, the country is badly run.

Party conferences, however, tend not to produce the best of our politicians. The compulsion to throw some red meat to party members pushes otherwise moderate politicians to the extreme, often going beyond simply turning the volume up, into foolish statements which they can live to regret.

The most obvious example in recent years was just last week, at the Green Party of England and Wales’ annual gathering. The by-product of the ‘Zionism is racism’ debate was a new party policy which called for the abolition of the state of Israel and its replacement with a democratic Palestine, in which apparently Jews would be welcome to live (they didn’t produce a list of the exemplar free democracies in the Middle East; it wouldn’t have taken long). If ever there was a use for the phrase “stay in your lane”, that was........

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