Tea for one. White, please.

The libertarian Freedom Association is holding a Tea Party at the Conservative Spring Conference in Brighton this weekend, modelled on the American anti-tax grassroots movement. If you are interested in going along, the event is open to the public.

Elsewhere in the media world, however, people are already well into the second round of cucumber sandwiches and are starting to eye up the Battenberg. This article from Norman Tebbit from a couple of weeks back is a well-drafted version of the latest conspiracy theory - that Labour in government deliberately opened the immigration floodgates in order to create lots of Labour voters.

This is an odd charge on many levels. Immigrants, even EU nationals, can't vote in general elections, and even if they could, my experience is that Poles and other central Europeans tend to have fairly right wing politics by British standards.

Factually inaccurate and shakily based it might be, but it's also the first time that I've seen the mainstream really pick up on a properly nutty New World Order-type conspiracy theory.

It's different in quality from the usual anti-elitism of the tabloids, directed at the EU, or judges, or other people seen to be insufficiently in line with what the papers believe we ought to think today.

This conspiracy has a darker tone, a more paranoid, race-treachery sort of tone, that wouldn't sound out of place on the Watergate tapes, or even in the pages of der Stürmer c. 1932.

I hope that this is just a passing phase, and that the racist and illiberal vitriol on many blog comments isn't leeching back into the mainstream discourse of politicians who might one day hold office.

I hope that's the case, I fervently do. But when I see Lord Tebbit, former senior minister of the Crown and member of the House of Lords, use the blog-ranter term "NuLab" to describe the party of government, I do start to worry.