Just as there are surefire ways to lose an argument (compare your antagonist with the Nazis, confuse cash and real terms, suggest that Paraguay has some innovative solutions worth emulating when reforming asylum policy) so there are some safe routes to avoid defeat in debate.

Whenever your logic is buckling, whenever you've been outmanoeuvred by fact, whenever your arguments come under strain, simply adopt one of the English language's most useful techniques. The Piece Of Palpable nonsense That we All Regard as unquestionable Truth, or Poptart for short. The most reliable poptart I know is the blithe assertion that something is “the exception that proves the rule”. Explode any hypothesis with contrary evidence and this poptart is used to delegitimise your point.

So the argument goes: “You neocons are wrong about democratising the Middle East - it's terribly arrogant of you to imagine these ancient civilisations want Western methods of government...”

“What about Iran?”

“Oh, that's the exception that proves the rule - they're Persian not Arab/Shia not Sunni/only worried about these things in the cities/ being manipulated by Britain's incredibly gifted Foreign Office establishment that has always believed in supporting grassroots reform movements to overturn sitting rulers...”

One of my favourite poptarts is the argument that you can have too much of a good thing (democracy, people staying in education for longer, consumer choice, children). It sounds like an Aristotelian plea for moderation. But in fact it is an implicit demand that you do what you're told by an apprentice dictator. The unspoken assumption is that the individual uttering the words knows precisely who should rule (him), who should go to university (his children), what you should eat (nothing he wouldn't) and how much love you've got to spread around (less than him).

Other great poptarts include that something can be “too clever by half” - neurosurgery, cord blood stem-cell therapy or non-thermal treatments for wet macular degeneration, are all, presumably, a waste of time - and the assertion that, while something might work in theory it won't in practice - gravity or the price mechanism. If something works in theory it works tout court. Until a better theory comes along. That's the scientific method, but then, one of the biggest poptarts of our time is that science has become arrogant and needs taking down a peg or two.

Whether it is Professor John Gray hitting the bestseller list by deploying years of learning to tell us in 160 elegant pages that this whole Enlightenment business of believing in reason and progress was a bad thing, or the guys who want homeopathy and reiki on the NHS because conventional medicine doesn't cure the whole patient, there's an appetite for arguments that tell us that a reliance on the rational isn't reasonable. Which suggests that the best way to avoid losing arguments is not to get into any...

Time for change

I shall, however, ignore my own advice and start a whole series of new arguments. By bringing in the Nazis. One of the great joys of history is the counterfactual, the what-iffery, exemplified in the brilliant Andrew Roberts book What Might Have Been. What if Halifax had succeeded Chamberlain in 1940? What if Napoleon hadn't retreated from Moscow in 1812? What if Stalin had in 1941?

The corollary of the counterfactual is the Time Travellers' Test. If you could travel back in time and intervene at one moment in history what would you do?

Assassinate Hitler? Stop Lenin getting on that train to the Finland Station? Slip something in Mao's rice wine before he got the idea of the Cultural Revolution?

My own hunch is you could avert the need for all of the above if you got between Gavrilo Princip's bullet and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Almost all the miseries of the last century can be traced to the greatest civilisational catastrophe of all time - the First World War. There was a madness abroad in Europe in 1914, as the new Tate Modern exhibition of the war-worshipping Italian Futurists reminds us. Prewar Europe was a uniquely liberal and civilised place. And it was all swept away, in a ceremony of blood that ushered in eight decades of oppression.

So I'd wrench the gun out of Princip's black hand. And this is where the argument begins. I defy readers to think of a better use of a rent in history's tapestry. What's your answer to the Time Travellers' Test?

Witches' brew

I was saddened to hear that a coven of witches had been banned from using a Roman Catholic church hall in Stockport for a ball - for which they had ordered a finger buffet and booked an Abba tribute band. But I would prefer my witches to hold their social events not in church halls, but on bare mountains or unhallowed graveyards with imps familiars, broomsticks and real fingers to tuck into in the buffet...

Michael Gove is the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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