The Agenda for Today: Family Values : The nation is now ready, it seems to me, for action to be taken on the political-correctness front. . . .

It has become impossible to utter a sentence without the barons of the new trendiness insisting on the inclusion of the words standards, individual, values, responsibility and family. It doesn’t matter in what order they occur or what meaningless nonsense they denote, the words must dominate what statesmen like to call our “agenda.”

Eight years ago, I wrote an article in the Listener wondering at the half-cocked stupidity of politicians displaying such impertinence. The trendy belief in family values had already been going for a good seven years by then and there seems even now to be no end in sight. Nobody minds that the Conservative governments of the last 15 years have contained at least six adulterers and two homosexuals at Cabinet level and dozens more on the back benches. If these men want mistresses, love-children and boyfriends, then good luck to them.

The British are a decent, tolerant and friendly people and like to see their fellow citizens enjoying themselves in a kindly, responsible and adult way. What really gets our goat is when these same men and their colleagues stand on podia in seaside towns at party conference time and tell us how to behave in private; what causes us pain and indignation is to hear them lecture the nation about the virtues of the family and deride those of us who prefer not to have our moral horizons dictated by the Daily Mail.

The Family: that noble institution responsible for 70% of all murders, over 80% of incidents of child abuse and a full 100% of all cases of incest.