The Mail on Sunday can still surprise

The Daily Mail and its weekend stablemate the Mail on Sunday have, let us say, a generally conservative stance. It's not the sort of paper in which you'd expect to find this:

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and...