Are liberal conservatives now history?

It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a magical, charming place in the countryside there. We were discussing audiobooks of the kind you could listen to on a long car journey and I mentioned how Julian, my partner, and I had enjoyed my Times colleague David Aaronovitch’s memoir of childhood and youth, Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists.

If you haven’t read it, do. David’s family were hardline members of the British Communist party. He was brought up to believe that ‘God Save the Queen’ was an anthem of imperialist oppression, and the revolution, hopefully peaceful, was perhaps just around the corner. The family holidayed in Bulgaria, had high hopes for the Soviet Union, and spent their leisure time in London at party meetings, distributing leaflets and banging the drum for the ideology in which they placed all their faith.

There was nothing clandestine about this. The Aaronovitches were not sinister or malevolent people, just a family seized with a hopeless conviction, and at first David never questioned it. Later he did. He has ended up pretty close to the ideological centre in our politics, and is a champion of the freedom of thought and speech that his erstwhile fellow activists would have regarded as a product of liberal false consciousness. But his book is full of kindness and sympathy — and a measure of bafflement — towards the misplaced faith of a political grouping who were almost a tribe. How could they possibly have believed such things?

Describing the book, Julian said he didn’t suppose it had sold particularly well, because who these days, apart from a few recalcitrant Corbynites, is interested in a washed-up dogma that proved a dead end in modern history? How different (I thought) from people like my friends and me, liberal conservatives fighting the good fight against Brexit, little Englanders and vulgar populism.