Grit

How many years in a row is this? Three? Four? This is what winters are going to be like from now on. It is perfectly obvious that we do need the infrastructure investment necessary to turn us into Scandinavia or Canada.

But who is going to dare to propose that? For one thing, think of the carbon footprint, darling. It is no wonder that there are twice as many Labour peers as Conservative ones on the Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

That is one of many ways in which there is no more a popular but politically effective New Right now than there was in the 1980s, when social conservatives and educational traditionalists might as well have carried on voting Labour, as many of them had previously done, for all the influence that they had on the doings, rather than on the sayings, of Thatcher and of her Government. Eurosceptics would have been a great deal better-advised to have done so.

And even upholders of the aristocratic tradition advocated by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne and the Sunday Telegraph could not have had any less influence by doing so. Indeed, they would have found natural allies among those equally concerned to preserve the equally moderating and civilising influence of organised labour and of the culture that it sustained.