It was Theresa May who worried, some 20 years ago, that the Tories were becoming the “nasty party”, but let me tell you about a few of the things left-wingers have said to me lately. Let me also show you what some of the so-called progressives, the nice ones, have said, in public and private, openly and secretly. Then let me ask you a question: who’s nasty now?

The most recent example you’ll know about already: the Labour MPs and councillors in that now notorious WhatsApp group. One of them suggested a voter should be mown down by a truck. Another hoped a pensioner who didn’t vote Labour would die before the next election. Yet another accused someone of sounding “too Jewish”. And how about this one: “The public are a***holes.” I wonder how many of the members of the group have at some point tweeted the words “be kind”.

If you were in the mood to try to defend the group, which I’m not, you might say they were mates talking in private and indulging in blokey banter or pub hyperbole they never intended to be public, and yes, we do say things in private we’d never say in public. But the problem is that this kind of rhetoric, particularly rhetoric involving violent imagery, has become increasingly common among some left-wingers and people who, in public at least, suggest they are the progressive ones, the non-violent ones, the nice ones.

Let me give two recent examples that happened to me. I was talking to someone at a party at Christmas who seemed reasonable and nice, and the subject of the shooting of the US healthcare insurance boss Brian Thompson came up. The person I was speaking........

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