The conservatives who understand this today are, like Proust’s gay gods, the least socially acceptable. Ukip is all about identity: beer, cigarettes and immigration. America’s Tea Party loves its God and guns. What Scruton thinks of these rebels remains unsaid in How To Be a Conservative, but they might be described as symptoms of the failure of mainstream conservatives to recognise that the appeal of their tradition is its traditionalism. The further that the Tories or Republicans run away from their past, the less they seem a serious alternative to the socialists or the multiculturalists. Scruton concludes that we need a conservatism that offers to preserve the things that make life worth living: “we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realised”. Ironically, that process must begin with the rescue of conservatism itself – which has to be as jealously guarded from the barbarian’s axe as that old oak tree.