WHY I DAREN'T ADMIT TO BEING A TORY

James Delingpole has discovered that if you

are right-wing, the best thing to do is to keep your mouth shut

A FEW months ago a groovy young columnist invited me to be her date at the premiere of a porn movie. I felt terribly privileged, first because I'd never been to a porn premiere before, second because the guest list included Martin Amis, and third because this columnist writes incredibly well and, as with most people I admire, I wanted her to be my friend.

Up until the after-show party, all went terribly well. I didn't get drunk and go up to Martin Amis and ask whether he thought I looked a bit like him; I laughed knowingly at all the funny bits and didn't go too squirmy during the buggery sequence. But no sooner had I grabbed my post-cinecoital beer than it all started falling to pieces. 'So,' said my date, half disbelieving, half uncomprehending. 'What's this I hear about you being right-wing?'

Well yes, it's true, I had to confess. I am. But it's not something I tend to talk about unless I can be sure of my audience. Obviously, I feel safe enough writing for publications like this whose readership tends to be of a similar disposition, and at some — but definitely not all — of my friends' din ner parties. Pretty much everywhere else, though, I must assume that I am in enemy territory; that if I betray the merest scintilla of my political beliefs I will automatically be written off as a Tory Fascist Wanker.

So how big a TFW am I? A pretty enormous one, to judge by my date's appalled expression, as I fumblingly tried to field her next question. It was an elephant-trap-sized one about where I stood on immigration. And though I did my best to tiptoe around it with the statutory platitudes — genuine need . . fleeing persecution . cultural vibrancy, etc., etc. — I ended up falling right into it by admitting that I thought there was a limit to the numbers we could absorb, and there was something to be said for trying to defend the qualities which made Britain such an attractive country in the first place.

The problem is that you're not supposed to say these things. Or so my date clearly thought — I could tell by the pitying way she was looking at me. Like: 'How can such a nice guy hold such abhorrent views?' As a kindred spirit grumbled to me later, the problem with the Left is that it's not enough for them to disagree with you. They have to make you feel stupid and wicked as well.

Which is how this piece came about. I'd been asked by a mooted new TV politics programme whether I fancied appearing as their token groovy right-winger and I was worrying aloud to the editor about whether this would be a mad idea. I mean, just look at the stick you get merely for making a few mildly Tory-inclined remarks on Have I Got News For You. Do I really want complete strangers calling me 'Cunt' in the street? 'But I get it all the time,' protested the editor. 'Yeah, but the difference between you and me is that I don't have to,' I said. 'I'm not a Tory MP.'

It's a nauseatingly cowardly position to take, I know. But the problem with sticking your head above the parapet, I've discovered, is that you tend to get shot. I remember at the time of the Hatfield disaster trying to argue the case for Railtrack with some modish middle-class friends. But they weren't interested in boring factual details such as Signals Passed At Danger, the risks of road travel relative to rail travel, and the cost-benefit analysis of the mega-expensive safety measures which of course they insisted now had to be implemented. What mattered to my friends was that companies run for profit — like the ones they buy their wine, lamb and extra-large Rizlas from — must perforce be evil and that anyone stupid enough to defend them was quite obviously a TFW.

And that was just my friends. At about that time, I used occasionally to appear on a radio current-affairs comedy programme, and I dread to think what might have happened had I expressed such opinions on air. Of course no one at the BBC is censoring you. You just happen to be aware that if you want to get any laughs from the studio audience, let alone avoid being ripped to shreds by the professional stand-ups on your panel (which invariably includes SWP members like Jeremy Hardy or Linda Smith), the one thing you don't do is diverge from the accepted political position. Which is always left of Mr Blair.

In my case, this isn't that difficult. I dress like a teenager, I swear like a bastard, I often forget to shave and I write about drugs and rock music. No stranger who ever meets me imagines for a moment that I'm a TFW. And since, like most people, I'd rather be liked than not liked, it's an illusion with which I'm happy to play along.

Of course there are occasions when I'm tempted. When I see one of those Huntingdon Life Sciences protesters, I want to tell them I think that Dr Cohn Blakemore is one of the bravest men on earth, and that far worse than cruelty to animals is to deny needy humans the benefits of vital medical research. And when I hear one of those achingly trendy anti-globalists like Radiohead's Thom Yorke or Naomi Klein, I yearn to ask them how they imagine that any country can remain an island in a glob al economy and whether it isn't a touch smug of rich white Europeans to call 'exploitation' what Third World workers call a healthy wage. But I never would, obviously, even if I got the chance. So much easier to go with the flow, show you're one of them, avoid the hassle. Pass the joint, man.

You could argue that there has never been a good time to admit to being Tory; or that the problem is at least as old as the Sixties when the Left seized control of the discourses of compassion and cool. But never has it been more embarrassing to be one than under New Labour, which, thanks to the happy accident of the sound economy it inherited from the Tories, has managed to persuade a gullible middle class that you can espouse all the socialist pieties and still live like a rich capitalist pig.

As one correspondent, Hilton Holloway, put it earlier this year in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, this is 'the essence of two-faced New Labourism'. Mr Holloway was responding to Helen Fielding's claim that her character Bridget Jones would never have voted Tory. 'Bridget thinks that voting Tory is tied up with naff pastimes and is socially unacceptable,' Mr Holloway noted. 'Not to vote Labour is to reject kindness to animals, gays and single mothers.'

He went on to imagine a future in which Bridget finally got married, had children and suddenly discovered that the public medical and educational systems weren't up to much. 'No matter. People like her can afford to go private or at least to throw money at the problem. If school fees are too much to face financially or morally Bridget and her husband will move to a smart catchment area for a good school. She will then pull out all the stops to make sure that her children have the best. Nothing will be left to chance in her attempts to push her offspring to the top of the tree. Meanwhile her husband will get his backside kicked if his career doesn't progress fast enough to ensure the finance for private tutoring, private healthcare and a big car. The less advantaged are trampled under foot by Bridget Jones and her ambitious fellow parents. But hey — she votes Labour.'

I wonder if any of my similarly afflicted friends have ever paused to consider the hypocrisy of their position. Somehow I doubt it, for unlike Conservatism, the Left/Liberal Weltanschauung is not about thinking things through or facing the consequences of your actions; it's about emotions rather than arguments, abstract concepts rather than concrete realities.

Which is why I often find myself wishing I were a Left-Liberal myself. How much easier it would be to wake up every morning and not find yourself eaten up with cancer-inducing rage at the latest government lie, inanity or cock-up. How much smoother life's path would run if one could behave as monstrously and selfishly as one

wished, automatically redeemed by the spray-on niceness that Left-Liberal affiliation confers.

But I just can't bring myself to do it. Like most Tories, I think the way I do, not mainly because of selfishness, but rather out of respect for my fellow human beings. I believe in personal liberty and I hate it when bossy self-important apparatchiks take away perfectly good freedoms, whether it's the right to trial by jury or the right of doctors to treat patients on the basis of clinical need rather than political targets.

I believe that — with only a few modest checks and balances — individuals can be trusted to do the right thing without the corrupting interference of an overweening state which terrifies perfectly good institutions into apologising for being 'racist', and then second-guesses every individual's autonomous decision; I believe the economic and social benefits that accrue from respecting people rather than politicians will be greater, for both rich and poor, than anything that tax-and-spend socialism has ever achieved. After all, if ever more government spending makes the world a nicer place, then Albania would have been paradise in the 1970s.

The reason I'm a Ton: is not that I'm a fascist wanker but, au contraire, that I'm nice. Why can't those bastard lefties understand?