The Left’s Most Venerable Tradition

Is there a spectre threatening Europe? That was the question put to a panel (on which I served) at Joao Espada’s twentieth annual Estoril Political Forum on the Portuguese coast in late June. The Forum is always an important event because its founder, Professor Joao Espada of the Catholic University of Portugal, takes great care to ensure that the speakers represent the full range of respectable political opinion in the Euro-Atlantic world and that an atmosphere of good-humoured tolerance suffuses the most contentious debates.

How different, how very, very different from the home life of our own dear university vice-chancellors.

As a result of Professor Espada’s stewardship, those who have attended earlier conferences—they include some of the brightest students from good universities on both sides of the Atlantic—are among the very few people not astonished by such events as the British vote for Brexit or the defeat of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in France’s…