For the first time in 35 years I am not packing my bag to travel to the Tory party conference tomorrow. The party I joined as a student and first campaigned for in the 1979 general election is suffering a convulsion that makes it — for now at least — unrecognisable to me. Gone is the relaxed, broad-church coalition, united by a belief in free-trade, open markets, fiscal discipline and a fear of the pernicious effects of socialism, but tolerant of a wide range of social and political opinion within its ranks. In its place is an ideological puritanism that brooks no dissent and is more and more strident in its tone.

Boris Johnson asserts, ever more boldly, that we will leave the EU on