Fifty years ago this autumn your columnist joined the Conservatives, signing up to a Tory ginger-group at university. Ten years later I was the MP for the Derbyshire constituency that remains my home. Leaving parliament more than 30 years ago, my respect for Margaret Thatcher and her party was undimmed, and I never parted company with my local Conservative association. There followed four decades of supporting the Tories through thick and thin, usually with enthusiasm, occasionally through gritted teeth and in recent months beginning to despair utterly.

The day I left parliament in 1986, however, I made a promise to myself: never would I do anything to undermine my outstanding successor, Patrick McLoughlin MP, now a Companion of Honour, whose long career as a humane,