Matthew Parris

Such is my respect for Spectator readers that I offer you a column whose subtext is in Latin. Ours is one of the last mainstream magazines among whose readership the phrase mutatis mutandis will be very widely understood. But the little test you and I are going to try concerns a live issue, not a dead language. For the purposes of this test I am going to paint you a scenario, and you’re going to give me the broad thrust of the advice you’d give in such circumstances. Imagine that the Labour party has been trying for some time to position itself firmly on the centre ground.

I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution is clear, minimal and simple. Any two parties jointly capable of commanding a Commons majority have an effective right to form a government together whenever they wish. That right is born of their joint ability to bring down any other government on the instant. So after the general election in 2015, unguided by the rule book, Mr Clegg and his party may have to make a primitive choice.

After David Cameron’s decision to seek parliamentary approval for air strikes against Syria, two lobbies came charging in, banners aloft. Now their attention has moved to Barack Obama’s decision to seek approval from the US Congress. Though on opposite sides of the argument, these two groups have something in common, and it depresses me. Both see democracy as capable of securing a right decision. Neither sees democracy as capable of making a decision right. Let me explain. The anti-interventionists are of course delighted (as was I) that our Prime Minister sought a Commons mandate for military action. They’re even more delighted now that Parliament has said no.

Last Saturday I wrote for my newspaper a column whose drift was that it was time for the sane majority of the Conservative party to repel those elements on the Tory right who plainly wish the Prime Minister and the coalition ill, and who would never be satisfied with his stance on Europe, however much he tried to adjust it to please them. I dealt at some length with Ukip, explaining why I and many like me would never support a Conservative candidate who made any kind of a deal with these people. The same went (I said) for the party nationally: ‘I will never support a Conservative party that has made any kind of national agreement with Ukip. Blackmailed by extremists, it could be blackmailed again.

Forgive me, but let’s go straight in. Readers of a sensitive disposition look away, but there’s a serious reason for the exercise I suggest that those with access to Google might like to attempt. There’s a thing called the AdWords Keyword Tool. You can find it at adwords.google.co.uk/-keywordtool. It is provided by Google for the benefit of online advertisers keen to select words or phrases they can use in order to catch as many Google searchers as possible in their net. So it will tell you how many people in the last month included in their search terms (say) ‘anti-wrinkle cream’: 22,200. But it is invaluable, too, to anyone curious to know what our fellow Britons are Googling.

Just before Easter, writing for the Times, I talked to 30 of the 40 Conservative MPs with the most marginal constituencies. My aim was to get a sense of how they think their party should position itself. I explored their opinions on a range of vexed policy areas. Finally I asked whether David Cameron’s leadership was a help or hindrance. The broad conclusion was that most marginal MPs took a decidedly and sometimes passionately ‘softline’ position on most controversial issues, European ‘interference’ in domestic human rights questions offering the nearest thing to a hardline consensus. And all considered Mr Cameron a plus, though more weakly in the Midlands and North. I wrote up my results in some detail, my focus being to make a factual report.

Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to myself out loud. ‘Vosene’. What an odd title for a shampoo. It sounded cold, clinical, antiseptic, perhaps a little harsh: a nod more in the direction of hygiene than of the soft, caring, nurturing image that more recently branded hair products aim to convey. I bet (I thought, remembering my 1950s bedroom wall poster of nuclear power stations) that Vosene is a mid-20th-century brand name.