Confessions of a True-Blue Tory

I was born anti-Communist. My mother was a refugee from Stalin and Communist Hungary and very Conservative. Her bed-time stories were full of real-life hair-raising escapes and the villains were always the Germans or the Communists.

Her father had been a Hungarian Liberal politician and one of his sayings was: “First the Fascists wanted to kill me; then the Nazis wanted to kill me; then the Communists wanted to kill me. I must be doing something right.”

So family tradition ensured that I was deaf to the blandishments of socialism. There were other reasons.

Comprehensive

For the whole time I was at the excellent local grammar school, it was under threat of being turned into a comprehensive by the Labour government and the wicked witch of the east, Barbara Castle MP. Or that Communist cow, according to my mother.

The students there were nearly 50% Jewish and I had no idea why anybody would want to be anti-Semitic, was enthusiastically pro-Israel as well. Although I was a Catholic, I admired the Jewish girls who, unlike me, were both bright and hard-working. (I didn’t do working, I was too busy writing stories.) Unfortunately quite a lot of them became enthusiastic supporters of the Socialist Workers Party, or were Trotskyites or Marxists and it never occurred to me that they might have their reasons. After all, some had parents or grandparents with concentration camp tattoos on their arm. Anyway, I thought they were silly to believe in fairytales like…