I once briefly dated a chap who turned out to be an active member of the openly-racist National Front. I think he’d known how I’d react, so he’d deliberately kept his beliefs very quiet until one evening, when he got drunk and careless, broke cover, and tried to recruit a friend of mine who worked for the Home Office. Being a Guardianista myself, I was utterly horrified, and felt a bit queasy about the thought that I’d had sex with a proud ignoramus. I was surprised how much his politics actually physically disgusted me, and had to take a long look in the mirror to figure out why.

Pj O’Rourke once said “I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me. I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed an sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”

Yet I found the opposite to be true in this case. This man actually believed and promoted ideas that were not only harmful, but also completely illogical, primitive, ill-thought-out and more akin to those of a monosyllabic thug than the man he’d briefly seemed to be, and this gave me the unsettling feeling that he was mentally defective in some way. He was secretly a creature so unfathomably stupid that he hadn’t even evolved past the basic caveman prejudice that one’s own tribe is somehow more human than its neighbouring tribe. We all have the inherent drive to claim and territorialise our space, to metaphorically piss in corners like a tomcat and fear the outsider – especially if that outsider has a different skin tone, speaks in a different language, calls his god by a different name, calls his god by the same name but believes something subtly different about the transubstantiation of bread and wine, has black hair, has blonde hair, has ginger hair, has blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes, bloodshot eyes, or wears a different coloured football shirt – yet most of us realise that we’re not mindless animals and quickly grow out of that mentality, don’t we? I’d somehow ended up shagging a knuckle-dragging thicko and hadn’t even realised it! Did failing to notice his towering stupidity make me even stupider than him? Had I been outwitted by a halfwit? Was idiocy contagious?

Anyway, I ditched him immediately and went home to burn all my clothes, bathe in disinfectant, and shout EWWWWWWWWWW into the mirror for many, many hours.