Some may be worried by the consequences of this; but even they no longer believe in a return to some some unachievable fantasy of the universal 1950s nuclear family. Lord Tebbit’s typically deplorable attempt to diminish the candidature of Mr Portillo is not only indefensible; it is a desperate but wholly anachronistic attempt to keep that fantasy alive.The mistake, however, is to think that social liberalism alone is the panacea that will end the Tory party’s problems. While it is most welcome, and could undermine a government with its own streak of illiberalism, any leader, whether from the diehard right or from the pro-European left, such as Kenneth Clarke, will have to find some way of reconciling the divisions on Europe. The unity of Mr Hague’s Tory party on this issue was the unity of the sect. It excluded some of the biggest and most popular figures in the party; those who had most experience of winning elections. The minimum requirement of a successful Portillo candidature ­ successful, that is, in the sense of making the party electable as a government rather than merely making Mr Portillo electable as leader ­ is a licence to differ on Europe, and the single currency in particular, which can bring pro-Europeans back into the Shadow Cabinet.The converse would apply to a Clarke leadership bid as well, of course. He could not ignore the convictions of a majority of the parliamentary party; but he showed, in his abortive leadership bid in 1997, that he understood this.

The first sharp question for Mr Portillo today is whether he too is really ready to lead a Shadow Cabinet of all the Tory talents. It is not far-fetched to say that the future of his party could depend on his reply.. Garry Bushell is a columnist, a TV critic, an occasional presenter of very late-night telly programmes, a member of Mensa, and ­ now ­ a novelist. This (my thanks to the Daily Star for this first excerpt from Bushell’s Face) is how he opens. “Harry Tyler steered his dark blue G-reg Granada smoothly into a lay-by, got out and walked to a telephone box. Needless to say the handset had been ripped off.” If it was needless to say then why did he walk up to it? Because he’s almost as much of an idiot as his creator, who ­ a bit later ­ has his hero (Johnny “Too Handsome” Baker) in a clinch with a blonde. “In the back of the cab,” we learn, “he slipped a hand down the inside of her stockinged leg and met no resistance.” You’ve got to laugh.The highlight of day one of the serialisation, however, was an encounter at traffic lights between Johnny, his friend Pyro Joe, and some unwelcome visitors, “Kosovan refugees…

with their squeegees.” When the Kosovans fail to take no for an answer, they pay for their obduracy. “Johnny was out of the car in a heartbeat, pushing the Kosovan away. He let the Kosovan drop to the floor and put his right boot on his head. ‘Oh, excuse me mate,’” said Johnny, “‘am I standing on your head?’”
I only mention Bushell, who is a dreadful writer, because this week also saw the launch of a book by his fellow Sun columnist and rival, the much-lionised and awarded Richard Littlejohn. And in Littlejohn’s novel, To Hell in a Handcart, there is a remarkably similar event. Littlejohn’s hero is a former copper who shoots dead a criminal bogus asylum-seeker from Romania who is on his property.

His action is made easily understandable, following ­ as it does ­ on a series of terrifying attacks on the former cop and his family, first by knife-wielding squeegee merchants and then by travellers from the local illegal encampment.The squeegees appear on page 18, thus: “There must have been ten or a dozen, swarthy, olive-skinned young men with gold teeth in designer clothes, women in shawls and headscarves with babies in arms thrusting their hands towards the car ‘Money, money, give me money, English Hungry Help Give. My baby starving.’”They smash his car windows and try to stab him. He escapes and talks things over with cousin, Roy, who tells him that, “the local council had spent a fortune housing them [gypsies by the context], yet his sister had been on the waiting-list for 12 years,” (page 44). Meanwhile (page 61) Ilie, the man who is to die, has chosen this country because, as the narrator puts it: “Britain had a reputation throughout Eastern Europe for being a soft touch.” When he had arrived with others in Kent, “The women had immediately started begging outside a fast-food outlet. The men banged on car windows at petrol pumps demanding money. The children descended on a convenience store and stole everything they could carry.”Ilie goes to a hostel in Tottenham. “All rooms had satellite television and small refrigerators like hotel mini-bars.. There was a snooker room.. a brand new tennis court and a five-a-side football pitch Ilie was amazed at the generosity of the British.