Tim, I really enjoyed this piece and am glad I played a tiny part in bringing it about. I think you're correct to emphasise the many good things that were done under John Major and, comparing his record to Brown's and Cameron's he does now start to look like a towering figure - albeit, perhaps, towering over Edwina Currie! I do think that he will be forever defined by the ERM debacle. What I most recall about that was that, when warned it was ruining the economy, he refused to listen and resorted to hurling abuse at his many Tory critics - so like David Cameron (and, of course, Bruce Anderson) now - and, of course, like Merkel, Sarkozy and the other Eurofanatics who, like Major, prefer to ruin the lives of tens of millions of people rather than admit they had got things wrong.

Not for the first time, Sally really couldn't be more wrong; far from "entryism" there has been substantial "exitism" since Major's catastrophic ERM experiment, in the shape of large numbers of former Tory Party members and voters leaving the fold - many, of course, to join UKIP. In view of that, it says much about the extent to which the Eurosceptics have won the argument that, despite the exit of so many Eurorealists, the Tories are more Eurorealist than they were in the 1990s.