And so it was a day or so after Christmas and my daughter was down in Bristol for Christmas Number 2. How about we pop along to the Conservative club for a quick drink I suggested, keen to lead young people along a path of virtue and righteousness.
But Daddy I have to tell you something about me first, she answered.
Oh Cripes thought I. “Will I be upset?” She responded honestly: “Daddy, you won’t like it.”
Oh double cripes.
What could it be? Might she have a boyfriend? Tried a touch of Nigella with her schoolmates? Could she be “coming out” already? After all she does live in Islington. Surely she cannot be pregnant? My mind raced through all these dreadful scenarios.
But it was worse.
“Daddy…I am a Liberal Democrat.”
God help us. Couldn’t she just be a coke fiend or a lesbian or something harmless?
I should have seen the warning signs when she started lecturing me a couple of years ago about how I was killing the poor polar bears by using an electric cheese grater. Or perhaps when she referred to the country between Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt as “Palestine.”
Do any other parents have any suggestions for how to cope with this? Might it just be a youthful phase they go through?
We had a brief discussion on the role of the state and taxation and I see glimmers of hope. I know that my daughter is a social liberal but her grasp of economics is good and I think that with some appropriate reading matter she may yet emerge as a crystal pure libertarian and be weaned away from the dark shrowd of liberal democracy. A long weekend boot camp with myself and Uncle Christopher (Booker) may well be needed to shake her free before this gets dangerous.