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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the journalist Ed West, who's the deputy editor of Unheard.

And his new book is called Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, which is, well, it's a book about conservatives who we like

here at The Spectator, but it starts from a slightly defensive point of view, because, Ed, if I

understand your starting point of your book, right, you're essentially saying you think that

you are a dying breed. Yes, it's quite a pessimistic book. It's a mixture of memoir, politics, history, kind of affairs.

I wrote it in the style, because I find politics books quite boring, and I find politics

quite boring a lot of the time, and it becomes too shouty, and people just end up just making

these sermons about the other side, how awful they are.

And I find it very off-putting, even from my own side, in fact, especially so.

So I wanted to write it more from a personal account just to make it seem more human.

So that was partly the reason.

But the underlying theme is that the cultural war is sort of more like a reformation,

or the analogies I use are the Reation and the Christian takeover of Rome and with a sort of losing side in both

these instances, the Catholics and the Reformation or the pagans in Rome. We are basically losing

and so that's my entire story. What I mean, what you say, I know,

which is sort of very eye-catching and curious,

is you say, look, it's never really been cool

to be a teenage Tory, and that's obtained for, I don't know,

...