Bearing in mind that it is fanatics in the Tory party who have landed the country in its current mess, it’s interesting to read the (conservative) political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, on conservatism. “To be conservative”, he wrote, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays,

”is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss”.

None of the current band of Tory ‘Eurosceptics’ is a conservative in that sense.