What we need is a glorious alliance between all sorts of people who hate each other

I once wrote a column about Camden Council, the total bastards, stealing my car. Never had a response like it. Lawyers got in touch, offering their services. Motorist groups wanted to sign me up. Readers wrote in, offering other tales of total Camden bastardy, or similar bastardy from elsewhere, and Tom Conti invited me round for a coffee. It was the first time I properly realised that modern Britain does, after all, possess a fearless, freedom-loving backbone. It’s just peculiarly preoccupied with things like parking tickets.

No disrespect intended to the glowering love interest from Shirley Valentine, but I always thought freedom was supposed to be sexier than this. It’s like that Freedom Zone thing they sometimes set up, just down the road from Conservative party conferences. The first time I went to one, I had dim hopes it might be like the free zone of Copenhagen, Christiania, where you can buy hash by the brick. Or one of those giant sex-industry shows they have in places like the ExCeL, which my photographer friends rave about, and where you learn about all sorts of exciting new places to which a lady can attach a leash. But no, it was just a bunch of sweaty-palmed bloggers, trailing around after David Davis again.

With freedom, sex and drugs are both good places to start. Last week, we had Sarah Palin on drugs. (That’s my newsy start point for this column — look hard enough and it’s always there.) Nattering away, vaguely, to Fox News, she was asked about cannabis. ‘If somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm,’ she said, ‘then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in.’ Finally, I think I get the point of her. As Norman St John-Stevas said of Margaret Thatcher, ‘When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks.’