I met one of you this week. A reader. I always knew you were out there. Indeed, I know of at least one person who buys The Times specifically to read my words (although the fact that her surname is Pollard and she is my mother diminishes the warm glow).

Some of you write to me, usually to call me names revolving around my appearance or my religion and sometimes demonstrating amazing linguistic dexterity by managing both in the same phrase.

But actually meeting one of you . . . well, I am still recovering. He had a pleasant demeanour, a nice smile and was softly spoken. And I think his intention was to compliment me. He walked up to me at a meeting I was chairing and said how much he enjoyed my columns. Thank you, I replied, touched that a stranger should say so. And then came the word that threw me. The word that has left me wondering if everything I’ve ever written has been not just a waste of my time but, more importantly, of yours.

“Yes,” he said. “you’re a real contrarian.” Reader, it was a knife in the back. A fist in the solar plexus. A pickaxe to the brain. Do you think I just go against the grain for the sake of going against the grain?

If I write that, to take this week’s news, far from Syria and Iran providing the solution to Iraq and the Middle East, the region’s two terrorist states are, rather, the problem, does it really seem that I am just being different for the sake of it?

There is nothing more boring — or, to be blunt, stupid — than taking a contrary view to the mainstream regardless of the facts. The received wisdom can often be disastrously wrong, as it was from the late 1980s when membership of the ERM was regarded by almost the entire political and media class as essential. Those of us who argued against it were dismissed as boggle-eyed lunatics. Now we know who were the real nutters.

Similarly, by the 1970s opponents of comprehensive schools were dismissed as backward-looking fools by a consensus that stretched from Tony Crosland to Margaret Thatcher (who, as Education Secretary, presided over the closure of more grammar schools than any other minister in history). Oh, what we would give now for schools that produced leavers who could read, write and go out at night without throwing up in the streets.

But there is a big difference between opposing the received wisdom because one thinks it is wrong and being a contrarian who opposes it just to oppose. One is honourable and thoughtful; the other merely the mirror image of the slavish followers of intellectual fashion.

I have encountered this difference in another guise this week, having just become president of the Centre for the New Europe, a free-market think-tank in Brussels. We work in a town where regulation is the default policy option and “solidarity” (a euphemism for state intervention against personal freedom) is the prized goal. But our motivation is not to be awkward or contrarian. It’s to fight for what we believe is best, such as tearing down trade barriers rather than, as the EU is prone to do, hoisting up drawbridges against imports. That may be contrary to the mainstream but it’s not contrarian.

Sometimes, though, you can’t win. My think-tank has a number of climate-change sceptics. On that, I’m with the received wisdom. I think it’s real, is frightening and is largely man-made. So I’m changing our formal stance and making clear that as an organisation we think it’s real. But that’s not the same as believing that Kyoto offers all the answers. There are other ideas, too, that can be pro-business and pro-growth.

That’s not good enough, though. Because I don’t sign up to the full slate of prescriptions advocated by the green lobby, I’m dismissed an opponent of green measures. A contrarian, in other words, like the climate-change deniers.

Well, I’m not. I believe what I write, whether one or one million readers agree with me. When I was a member of the Labour Party, I started arguing that education vouchers ought to be the passion of the Left, because handing over the power of the purse string to those who can’t afford to write out a cheque for school fees seemed to me a properly progressive idea. That almost no one agreed was not a reason for pushing the idea — it was a reason for despairing at the mindset of the Left.

So next time you read something I write, are horrified by it and think it’s only pour épater le bourgeois, I’m afraid it’s not. Weird as it might seem, I do actually think it’s true.

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