I am facing up to the fact that I may be a Marxist

It’s astonishing the people you find yourself agreeing with

Help! I think I might be turning into a Marxist and I know exactly when it started. It was in January last year when I was watching Question Time, despising most of the panellists for their cant-riddled idiocy as per usual, when I suddenly heard one of them, a slightly scary woman called Claire Fox, say: ‘Why can’t all our schools be like Eton?’

And she wasn’t asking it as a glib, meaningless flourish, in the way a Tory MP trying to impress might ask, ‘Why we can’t make our NHS system be the envy of the world?’ Claire Fox genuinely believes that a traditional, liberal arts education of the sort offered by Eton — Latin, Greek, rigour, dates — is best. And that it’s this that our state schools should be offering our dismal, failing youth — not half-baked, dumbed-down classes about citizenship, global warming and Mary Seacole.

I think this too, as strongly as Fox does. So I looked her up on Google to see what she was about and discovered that for 20 years she had been a core activist of the Revolutionary Communist Party and once published a magazine called Living Marxism. Marxist is how she still describes herself. ‘Gosh,’ I thought to myself. ‘How can this possibly be?’ I’d always imagined that anyone as far left as Fox would be mad keen, come the revolution, to have people like me put up against the wall and shot. Yet here I was, agreeing with almost every word she said.

Not just about schools either. On Islamism, on eco-fascist hysteria, on multiculturalism (a disaster), on GM crops (the dangers much overrated), and on hunting (rescind the ban) her position is very much what I would have once considered the sound Tory one.