‘I don’t think I’m quite as Austrian as you are,’ a Tory minister said to me the other day. And I knew then that the party is doomed. It wasn’t what he said so much as the way that he said it: in the fond, amused, each-to-his-own tone you might use to dismiss a friend’s enthusiasm for Morris dancing or Napoleonic re-enactment or dogging…

But personally, I think free market economics (of the Austrian or any other classical liberal school) is far too important to be left to wonks, think-tankers and out-there right-wing commentators.