As time marches on, there’s a particular expression that I notice crossing my Good Lady Wife’s chops with increasing regularity. The look is enhanced by a rolling of the eyes and a silently mouthed “here we go again”. To be fair to my beloved, the expression is a direct result of my actions, or rather my words. It happens when, as she puts it, I “go off on one” or “get on [my] soapbox”. To be even more fair, I give the mother of my children ample opportunity to wear the aforementioned expression; probably more than she’d like.

The fact is, like many men past the first flush of youth, I like a good old rant when something (or someone) gets my goat. And, for reasons that I can never quite understand, those situations arise more and more frequently. One comes up almost every week when I go to the Thursday market in town, just after half seven, to find the place chock-a-block with retired folk who’ve got all bleedin’ day to meander round the market and have long discussions with stallholders … and relax. Of course I shall deny that when I’m retired.

I notice that my fellow columnist, Ed Deedigan, likes a good rant as well. Just after the general election, Ed used irony to great effect to attack what he saw as the unreasonable media treatment meted out to the Labour Party during the campaign; accusing the press of ignoring and misrepresenting facts and launching personal attacks on the political colossus that was Ed Milliband.

This year, Mr Deedigan has railed against us spending millions on training Olympic athletes when we have people living below the poverty line. More recently, Ed seethed “the thought manipulation employed by those that wish to exploit us is so powerful it has convinced people who are not part of a wealthy elite to vote Conservative, be life-long supporters and even be deluded enough to represent them.” I’m not rich, so I guess I’m naive and gullible.

I understand why Ed – and many others – think like that. I did, until relatively recently. My personal gallop to slightly right of centre only really started in my late forties. In my twenties and thirties I was a supporter of Arthur Scargill; I turned down private health cover because I felt it to be anti egalitarian. But people change and I quite like the aphorism “If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head.” which is often misattributed to Winston Churchill.

In its heyday, the Labour Party was not about creating a society where all were equal; it was about equality of opportunity - hence the great social, educational and healthcare reforms of the 1940s. Gradually that has changed. In the seventies and eighties hard-left agitators shifted the party away from its original course until Neil Kinnock tackled them, enabling the now reviled Tony Blair to sweep into power on a tide of poplar support. As the political pendulum swung towards the Conservatives, many in Labour made the old mistake of assuming they weren’t left wing enough, eventually leading us to the catastrophe that is Chippenham born Jeremy Corbyn. Many of us feel that the honourable member of Islington North’s vision of equality involves dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator, rather than giving people the opportunity to thrive. To us, Conservatives create a culture where success is rewarded and that our society improves on the back of that success. It’s not perfect, but it’s about looking up, not down.

Those of us who think that way may well be ‘deluded’ and the victims of ‘thought manipulation’, but being hectored about it is hardly going to make us change our minds. If you tell someone they’re an idiot for adopting a particular course then they’re likely to say ‘stuff you!’ That’s what happened with Brexit. And it could well give us President Trump.