Remember Aidan Burley? He was the Conservative MP for Cannock Chase between 2010 and 2015. You might recall that he described the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics as "leftie multicultural crap". Or that he was sacked as a parliamentary private secretary to Justine Greening, then transport secretary, after he was photographed at a Nazi-themed stag party in 2011.

I thought of Burley yesterday, when I saw a picture of Desmond Swayne in blackface. Last week, Swayne, the Conservative MP for New Forest West, inexplicably chose to respond to the controversy over Justin Trudeau's habit of wearing racist make-up by volunteering that he had once done so himself. Today's Telegraph carries a picture of him dressed as an “authentic” (his adjective) James Brown. Blackface, he says, is an “entirelyalways in practice – having no truck with unreconstructed bigotry, or, indeed, anything that might make the Tories look like cartoon baddies. That very much included unapologetic, jolly hockey sticks, upper-sixth revue racism. It was a difficult process for a party whose old guard were, by and large, small-c conservatives. Swayne himself said so in a sober and reflective turn in The Cameron Years, the BBC documentary on his old line manager's time in Downing Street. He defended Cameron's decision to legislate for same-sex marriage as brave and necessary, despite the objections of the Tory backbenches and grassroots. Watch it: afterwards, you won't find it particularly hard to imagine him explaining why it had been necessary to sack a junior minister for wearing blackface.

But six years on from