Monday's Child

It is hard to believe that Aidan Burley MP is younger than I am. He must have had a very tough paper round.

But it is not at all hard to believe that he is a participant in a drunken Nazi subculture. That generation of Conservatives came up, fuelled by undergraduate levels of alcohol consumption, through first support and then nostalgia for apartheid South Africa, with its official monument to Hitler, and for the Nazi-harbouring pioneers of monetarism in Latin America. The crossover was enormous with the Continent's overtly Nazi drinking clubs and worse.

As recently as October 1997, a friend who was high up in the Young Conservatives showed me the catalogues sent out automatically to everyone on that organisation's mailing list. They featured everything from works of neo-Nazi economic thought to cassette recordings of the marching music of the Luftwaffe and of the Waffen SS.

It was the much-maligned Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis who put an official stop to all of this. That would not, and could not, have happened under Bullingdon Dave.