It is a most disconcerting experience when you encounter somebody who seems fairly normal but then casually remarks that they are from Venus, or that Princess Anne has been following them about in an ice cream van.

When this happens at scale, and everybody seems to shrug and accept it, you eventually stop noticing. The current Labour conference, for example, is a concentration of lunacy.

Progressivism is a kind of collective hallucination

Progressivism is a kind of collective hallucination

Away from the conference hall itself, the pottiness is always a little more pronounced. This time round, we’ve had backbench barminess like Dame Emily Thornberry’s enthusiasm for the seizure of private property, or Stella Creasy MP demanding the right to silence people who disagree with her. Junior minister Jenny Riddell-Carpenter has made the bizarre suggestion that pubs and dogs are, in fact, a ‘far-right fantasy’.

But the main stage has seen its own share of dangerous delusion. I had naively thought that new Chancellor John Healey seemed quite reasonable, at least for a Labour politician. After Rachel Reeves, even Nosferatu seemed a brighter prospect. But then he gave his big speech, in which........

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