The Economist, the British magazine well-known for its particular metropolitan liberal worldview, had a pearl-clutching cover piece last week where it bemoaned ‘the growing peril of national conservatism’.

‘It’s dangerous and it’s spreading,’ the editorial warned its readers – making it sound like some new Covid variant.

What exactly is national conservatism?

Australians could be forgiven for being a little in the dark, for while there have been national conservative conferences in Washington DC and Florida in America, and in London, Brussels, and Rome in Europe, there has been nothing similar so far here.