People often dismiss conservatives by snorting that ‘oh you just want to return to the 1950s’, but as Peter Hitchens argued in not so many words, the 1950s were an age of jittery sexual energy and licence – we want to return to the 1900s. The conservative golden age was the Belle Époque era before the First World War when life was just one big Mary Poppins-style adventure, a crime-free paradise with happy housewives carrying elegant umbrellas and Post-Impressionist artists drinking themselves to death with absinthe.
