Some decades ago, there was a Tory MP called John Stokes: eventually, and deservedly, Sir John. He had no interest in holding ministerial office, which was just as well, because he would never have been on any whips’ list for preferment. John was a right-winger: a very right-winger. I once told him that he was the Right Pole: impossible to move any further. He took this as a compliment.

He had many uses, not least of which was in teasing the snowflake tendency among Tory intellectual lefties (or at least, Tory lefties who regarded themselves as intellectuals). ‘John thinks’, I would say: this was before John Major’s eminence. My interlocutor wondered which John I was citing. ‘Stokes, of course’ would come my reply. There would follow aarghs and a demand for crucifixes plus garlic. It never failed to work: the shock, that it is – not sure about the remedies.

There was an element of self-parody. You could almost catch John winking to himself when he got the reaction he wanted. Moreover, he had been to Oxford, not an insignificant university. I never probed his reading habits, but would not be surprised to learn that like some members of the grandest St James’s Clubs, he had read more books than he admitted.

I miss the old so-and-so. Although you would not have asked him what he thought of modern monetary theory, there was a deep love of England, from which he derived the political wisdom that fashionable chatterers would despise. He also had an early-warning system, which should have been used more often by the Tory leadership to alert it to upcoming trouble. ‘We ought to be worried,’ he would say: ‘people are talking politics in the pubs.’

These days, that is true in the clubs. The other evening, to distract ourselves from the fascination and frustration of Tory electoral prospects, we swapped stories about that great Anglo-Franco-Hibernian wine-maker Anthony Barton. He was once at a grand gathering where American oenophiles were discussing their subject. Our transatlantic cousins make excellent wine and they know how to taste the stuff. But here is a problem. They don’t half take themselves seriously. I have often thought that they should ponder the word ‘degustation’. While not being quite onomatopoeic, it expresses the glorious, sensual, joyously self-indulgent pleasure of drinking wine, which links the votaries bending their backs during the harvest to the fortunate ones approaching a great bottle in the spirit of introibo ad altare dei.

Anyway, these Yanks were discussing tastes and smells, straining for every adjective in their vocabulary. Anthony was asked what he though of a particular nose. He clearly felt that some mild deflation was needed. ‘Reminds me of wet chihuahua’ came the answer. Consternation followed. The Americans pressed their noses to their glasses. That wine’s vintage was about to suffer a catastrophic fall in value. What did he mean, its wine-maker enquired, on the verge of tears. ‘At the end of the harvest, strolling past denuded vines, I would end up in the boot room. It always smells of my wife’s wet chihuahuas. Somehow, this bottle reminded me of that.’

Half of those in the room are no doubt still wondering whether he was taking the mickey. We paid tribute to a delightful man by quaffing some of his ’09, not an almighty year but a typically sound claret. It was easy to imagine a French autumnal day, with woodsmoke enticing the homeward-bound, their route via scents of wet chihuahua to rather more sophisticated enticements from decanters to come.