In our online edition, Danny Kruger, who is a dear man and my former employee, attacks our editor, Daniel Finkelstein and me for not joining Reform when ‘their party [he means the Conservatives] faces total extinction’. Lords Gove and Finkelstein are indeed Conservatives, but I am not a member of ‘their party’. I sit in the Lords as a ‘non-affiliated’ peer. My approach to life is definitely Tory, but not in a party sense. I would vote – if I had the vote – for any party that showed convincingly how it would govern in the light of conservative views. According to Danny, we should ‘stand barefoot in the snow’ in penitence and receive ‘absolution’ from Nigel Farage – whom he compares to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa. Then, if we are lucky, we shall be received into Reform in time for the May local elections. This is a bluff. Pope Nigel is not infallible and the chances of him leading the next government remain small. I claim no special insight in saying this: it is just the way our electoral system and related voter preferences tend to work. The opinion polls are already beginning to show this. I also think that those who insist Britain is ‘broken’ thereby establish a vested interest in proving their point. Reform is the product of anger, which I share, but anger is not the basis of good government.

As I sit writing in Westminster, yet another ‘anti-Zionist’ march is besetting Parliament, the date chosen, presumably deliberately, to follow........

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