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…