A nose of wet chihuahua: the rich vocabulary of wine

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.