Politicians love banning things. Even if the threats they worry about don’t actually exist.

In February 2019, amid Conservative defections and the slow death of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, Conservative MP Bill Wiggin decided that the most pressing task for parliament was banning the consumption of dog meat. Not meat for dogs, but meat made out of dogs. And no, you are right, you don’t get it at the deli counter at Waitrose. Or indeed anywhere in the UK.

Wiggin was honest enough to admit there was no actual evidence that dog meat was being eaten in the UK. And he acknowledged that it was already illegal to sell dog meat for human consumption. But that, he told the House, shouldn’t stop us from ‘setting an example to the world’.

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The same logic must have been running through this government’s mind when, last week, during a leadership crisis, it decided that the best way to regain the public’s favour was to publish a draft bill to ban what it calls ‘conversion practices’. 

Ostensibly this is a compassionate measure to counter persecution. No one who is gay should be subjected to cruel attempts to neutralise or change who they are attracted to. Who could object? There’s just one problem: no one has been able to find any actual systematic evidence of gay people being compelled to disavow their sexuality. Gay conversion therapy is no more of a problem in this country than the sale of tinned labrador.

Gay conversion therapy was a problem in the past, but that was well before the recent advances in equality. In 1918, Austrian endocrinologist Eugen Steinach claimed testicle transplantation could eliminate homosexual impulses. In 1952, Alan Turing was convicted of........

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