DH: It's in the nature of my job that I get to spend — and enjoy spending — a lot of time with my local activists. I have about 80,000 Conservative Party members in my region, perhaps a third of the national total, and my experience of local associations bears out what Nick has just said. A lot of people who are labelled "social conservatives" often turn out to have a rather British live-and-let-live attitude to life. They absolutely understand that you can disapprove of something without wanting to ban it, and that that distinction is critical to a free society. It's the same distinction they drew over banning handguns or outlawing foxhunting. You can call it libertarianism, if you like, but they'd call it common sense. Conservative activists, in real life, are not the way they're caricatured in the press, they're much more unpolitical than people imagine...

NB: Hallelujah!

DH: ...they're much more unideological, undoctrinaire, which I suppose you could say makes them better Conservatives. The one issue where I see real discontent is European integration, because it equally offends the ideological and the unideological Tories. It seems to be against common sense that, for example, we should be cutting budgets at home while upping our contributions to the EU budget, that we should be scrapping quangos at home but surrendering more power to the biggest quango of the lot, namely the European Commission, that we should be aiming to decentralise power in the way that Nick just outlined while at the same time centralising power in Brussels. Most Conservatives are very much on board with the coalition and its domestic agenda: I've been surprised by the extent to which even those of my activists who have spent their lives fighting the Lib Dems understand that we had to deal with the outcome that the electorate had given us. The main stumbling block — and I don't think I'm just choosing to hear this, it's genuinely what I'm getting — is over the EU and, specifically, over not getting the referendum people feel they were promised.

NB: I do agree with that but I think the reason why is less about the Conservative Party than the coalition as a whole. The Conservative Party is much more unified than it's ever been on Europe, in the sense that we're all eurosceptic, it's just a matter of degree. My view is more that the bloody thing gets in the way and wastes our money — not such an ideological position perhaps but nevertheless it's on a continuum. Therefore the reason I think there's a fault line is the fact that it's the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives in the coalition: it's the only set of issues on which we have fundamentally opposed positions and both feel pretty strongly about it. On almost everything else we might disagree, but one group will feel very strongly and the other party will let it ride. Or we genuinely agree, in which case it's obviously easiest.

DJ: Europe seems to be an article of faith for both parties.

DH: Actually, I don't think it has anything to do with the coalition. I've observed — I call it, rather pretentiously, Hannan's First Law — that no party is ever Eurosceptic while in power. Across Europe as a whole, concern about national sovereignty is an exclusively opposition phenomenon. Once a party takes office, it finds itself encased in a massive state machine. The Foreign Office, the home civil service, the NGOs, the big corporations, they all have a vested interest in European integration. To challenge all of them, to take on the entire nomenklatura, would consume all a politician's energies; it would take up his entire government programme. I don't believe that many British MPs are actively Euro-federalist. Let me put it like this: if Britain were already outside the EU, if we enjoyed a Swiss-style bilateral deal, it's hard to imagine many Tory front-benchers arguing that we should become full members. But, being in, they don't like to challenge the status quo. It's easier to drift with the current.