Try this thought-experiment. Name a time in recent memory when you could look at the prospects for Britain and the British and see more reasons — more long-term as well as short-term reasons — to be cheerful. You wouldn’t think it from this summer’s headlines, you wouldn’t think it from our politicians’ speeches, but a decade and a half into a new century, Britain is in cracking form. If you can’t see this, you’re a victim of the very malady I diagnose below.
Maybe that’s what I should have said before launching into a scornful column about Clacton before its by-election last October. To have one’s name booed spontaneously at a party conference is a distinction of sorts, I suppose: but was I right? In