Is driving inherently right wing? The evidence, initially, appears overwhelming. Many years ago, in Reithian times, the BBC used to produce a motoring show of quite narcoleptic dullness. The original Top Gear was a programme tailored for those who found One Man and his Dog too exciting.

A dreary survey of crankshaft performance and winter roadholding for every new vehicle on the market made for a show every bit as gripping as radial and crossply tyres on the same axle.

But, over the years, something amazing happened. Not only did Top Gear become addictive viewing, it did so by doing something I don’t think any BBC programme (apart from possibly The Moral Maze) has ever done: by moving to the Right.

Thanks to Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the programme has become a celebration of individual freedom, capitalist excess and private-sector innovation. It is also laced with laddish distrust of political correctness, nannying and Ken Livingstone-style finger-wagging. Some viewers might find its sensibility just a bit too juvenile, even public-schoolish, with the presenters mobbing each other up and addressing each other by their surnames. But I find it totally absorbing.

To put that absorption in context, regular readers will know that, however right wing I am, I am not a connoisseur of motoring media. As someone who passed their driving test at the seventh attempt, and celebrated by crashing my vehicle into a motorway bridge just a few months later, someone who doesn’t know what it is the petrol does in the engine that the oil doesn’t do, and someone who took 16 months before finding out which button to press to get the cleaning fluid out for the windscreen wipers, I am not what you might call a petrol-head.

Yet I find Top Gear a treat and have noted that some of the finest writers about cars (Neil Lyndon, Quentin Letts and my parliamentary colleague Boris Johnson) are also either temperamental, cultural or ideological conservatives.

There may be objective reasons why conservatives and cars (except in my case) mix so well. The car is a liberator, which frees you from reliance on collective provision; it’s a private space one can shape to suit one’s own or one’s family’s tastes and one of the last warm places where you can still smoke (though not for much longer).

And cars, like Conservatives, seem to attract similar enemies: Ken Livingstone, Liberal Democrat councils, Guardian columnists. There does seem to be some sort of relationship between those who love motoring and a certain sort of buccaneering Toryism.

And yet in my, admittedly brief, tenure behind the wheel I fear I may have been drifting just a tad to the Left. And I’m not talking about my poor lane discipline. There are certain things about driving in the Home Counties and London which incline one to troubling impulses of a nannyish kind. Actually, make that Stalinist.

Take tailgating. It’s a rare journey you make these days without, at some point, a hyper-aggressive pursuer driving right up behind you in an effort to register his annoyance at your own tardy progress. As someone who is not just temperamentally but professionally inclined to respect the speed limits, it is sometimes possible to avoid your back bumper being grazed at every twist in the road only by hurtling precipitately above the legal limit. Whenever I look in my mirror to see some aerated figure hunched over his wheel just inches behind me, his features bearing the strain of having a foot hovering permanently over the accelerator, I wonder if perhaps there’s something to be said for restraint rather than liberation.

And that same instinct, the belief that perhaps, when we have a tempered steel beast at our disposal, we tend to forget there is such a thing as society, strikes me with equal force when I contemplate the proliferation of really huge vehicles barrelling down the capital’s residential streets. I know that having a go at the drivers of 4x4s is as stale as a service station sandwich. I also know that those cars are vital in rural areas and they are the sort of environmental controversy-magnets discussion of which is best left to real experts like Camilla Cavendish. But I also can’t help feeling that some of the people behind the wheels of these behemoths have bought the security they clearly feel they need at the expense of a rounded consideration for the rest of us road users. They tend to pound the streets with a somewhat heavier tread than the rest of us. I’m sure you know what I mean.

And talking of consideration for others, one of the other phenomena I’ve noticed is the annoyance, bordering on rage, I encounter whenever I have to slow other people’s progress by either taking the time necessary to park safely outside my house, or decant children from the car. I’ve lost count of the number of people who, on seeing a babe in arms being extracted from a car’s rear seat see this as either a grotesque imposition on their freedom to career down the road, or even a reason to accelerate.

In every case driving seems to go hand-in-hand with, at best, an insouciant indifference to others and, at worst, hostility to their presence – an obstacle to getting one’s own way. I am exasperated with these trends and desperate to see courtesy restored on the highways. Does that make me a sucker for Stalinist centralism, or a crusty reactionary nostalgic for an age of leather-gloved chivalry behind the wheel?

One thing is certain. Whichever extreme that driving has made me lurch towards, I am certainly not happy to be in the middle of the road any more.

At the risk of putting my foot in it . . .

I read with interest last weekend that the average husband in Britain is 40 (check), married with two children (check), has a 37in waist (yup) owns 22 pairs of socks and makes love eight times a month.

Imagine my surprise on reading that the average figure is so high. That certainly puts me in my place. Where have I gone wrong? I suppose it has been my insistence on doing things the traditional way. I know it makes me dull, but at least you know what you’re getting.

I suspect that I have so few pairs of socks because I insist on getting woollen ones in charcoal grey.

And may I say thank you to all those who wrote in with suggestions on where to get good-quality woollen socks now that even my beloved Marks & Spencer seems to have gone over to cotton. The consensus is that the company to try is the reassuringly Caledonian-sounding concern of Scott-Nichol.

They’re more expensive than your standard hosiery buy, but the wool lends them a hardiness that other fabrics won’t have, and judicious darning can extend their lifespan beyond that of most mammals. Anyway, Sarah, if you’re reading this, at least that’s this Christmas sorted.

The Poliakoff puzzle

Have you ever met anyone who has enjoyed a Stephen Poliakoff television play?

Really? So much so they would watch it again all the way through?

Yes, he gets fantastic casts to bring his stuff alive, but not since the Tory election campaign of 1830 has so much talent been put at the service of such poor material.

Isn’t it time we invested all that television cash in a proper contemporary writer such as Howard Jacobson or Ian McEwan?

— Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

Times Recommends

• It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about Blair’s style
• You can’t rank hospitals like football teams
• Minarets are not an essential part of Islam