People have always presumed to know why I think what I think. Especially people who do not like whatever I have just written. Most of them are left-wing people who think I am right-wing. Which I am not. But I do understand that I sometimes express myself in a way that looks autocratic, rarely proposing compromise and deploying crude rhetorical techniques to drill my points home. And I recognise that because I do not endlessly whinge on about saving the NHS and giving free sweets to trans people, a huge swathe of the reading public, accustomed to the dither and flap and hand-wringing of The Guardian and BBC, assumes that I want to burn books, gas minorities and annex the Sudetenland.

And the reason I