As seen in the Daily Telegraph

‘Dubonnet, Mummy. Dubonnet mixed with gin was the Queen Mother’s favourite tipple.’ I am on the phone guiding the Duchess on her excursion to our local branch of Sainsbury’s. ‘I just can’t see any,’ she whinnies. ‘Ask the man, Mummy. And, failing that, the big Tesco in town.’ 

I smile as I hang up, refusing to let Mummy’s habitual uselessness irritate me. For it was the most delightful of days. After some truly torrid years on the centre-right of British politics, where gentle Conservatives such as myself were made to rub columns with nasty little bigots, the cordon sanitaire is being reestablished. After an all-too-long flirtation with what lies right of centre, the Telegraph – this Empyrean crucible of conservative thought – has renewed its commitment to sensible, moderate and tolerant politics.

We may stop pinching our noses, relax our nostrils and take in the clean bracing air of capital-C conservatism

So, rejoice! The likes of Nigel Farage and Allison Pearson are, at long last, being flushed down the lavatory. We may stop pinching our noses, relax our nostrils and take in the clean bracing air of capital-C conservatism, safe in the knowledge that the vile odour of ethnonationalism won’t be there to foul up the place.

There always was a headbanging element within the tendance Telegraph – your Norman Tebbits and your Peregrine Worsthornes – who could be counted on to raise the skirt for the Monday Club lot. Even BoJo’s old columns had their fruity asides about ‘picaninnies’, to say nothing of Lord Heffer’s wink-nudge act vis-à-vis Mr Enoch Powell. But over the past few years, these tolerated eccentrics somehow managed to engineer a hostile takeover. It was all getting a bit Love Thy Neighbour meets ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ on these pages, and so the gentler types – Brideshead Revisited with a splash of On the Buses – were starting to feel a bit unnerved. 

What went wrong? In a word, the internet. Armed with their touchscreens, lots of sad little boys living in their parents’ basements (I brave Mummy’s living room) scrolled through page after page of nonsense about migrant fiscal contributions and so-called Pakistani rape gangs. If they had been born but a generation before, they could have instead read my articles celebrating how fetching Sir Mo Farah looks swaddled in the Union Flag (never ‘Jack’) and my ecumenical relationship with the Book of Common Prayer, which leavens a wishy-washy Anglo-Catholicism.

Some will say that there is a certain irony to the fact that it has taken an invasion of the British press by Ze Germans! to cure us of the spreading cancer of totalitarian racial essentialism. But it is not without historical precedent. For it was we Brits who founded Axel Springer’s Die Welt in the embers of Berlin, some 80 years ago. And so the return of affable, evidence-based conservatism with a strong Judeo-Christian grounding and an unstinting commitment to the transatlantic alliance is not a hostile takeover, but a homecoming.

Albion’s seed has grown to be a mighty oak in a foreign land, and a judicious wind has carried one of her acorns home. Watching the Axel Springer crew enter the Telegraph newsroom that day, I felt like a French lady suppressing a flutter in her heart as stern columns of Prussian infantry marched into Paris in 1871.

And besides. With his large frame, handsome eyes, wit, cultivation and charm, is Mathias Döpfner not in his own way a typical English gentleman? A Hanoverian prince in the style of George I whose genial ignorance made space for wily Englishmen such as Robert Walpole? I leave you with that thought and the words of Daniel Defoe, defending a different continental liberator. ‘A true born Englishman’s a contradiction/ In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.’