My wife, Gillian, is the chairman of the trustees of St John's Smith Square. Last Thursday evening, the hall was being used for the BBC's Question Time. We were watching the discussion from the balcony; David Dimbleby kindly invited us to supper after the show. The last time I had seen Question Time live is now 25 years ago, when Robin Day was in the chair.

On Thursday evening, the Irish had voted on the Lisbon treaty, but we did not yet know the result. David Davis had announced that he was going to resign his seat in order to fight a by-election on issues of liberty. Only one member of the panel seemed to regard the Davis story as really important; that was Shirley Williams, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.

She spoke of Mr Davis's decision with considerable sympathy, more sympathy than I would have expected. Not for the first time, her judgment of a political issue was better than mine. The British people feel very strongly about the current issues of liberty; I admit that I think that Baroness Williams underrates their concern about liberty in Europe.

After supper, we drove down to Somerset late in the evening. Friday was, for me, a very enjoyable day. I had not expected the Irish to vote “no” to the Lisbon treaty; that seemed too good to be true after every other democratic defence against a bad treaty had failed. Only last Wednesday, the House of Lords had voted down Britain's promised referendum by 280 votes to 218.

I found myself voting for the referendum in the same lobby as Margaret Thatcher, just as I had when I voted for a referendum on the Maastricht treaty. I thought it was shameful that the Labour and Lib Dem peers would not honour the manifesto commitments of the 2005 general election. But, then, I had thought it shameful when Tory peers tamely obeyed their whips and voted down a referendum for Maastricht.

Saturday was a perfect Somerset day; we sat in the garden from lunch to tea. Two of our grandchildren were staying with us and two more had come across in the morning. Our youngest daughter, Annunziata, who is the Conservative candidate for Somerton & Frome, went off to canvas in villages near Bruton, including Pitcombe, where our eldest daughter lives, and Shepton Montague, where a lot of our ancestors are buried. Annunziata was able to bring back to us a fresh and up-to-date report on public opinion in southeast Somerset.

As I expected, the Irish vote had been greeted with delight. Earlier in the year, we had a local referendum in Somerset & Frome on the Lisbon treaty. Eighty-seven per cent wanted a referendum on the treaty and 88 per cent stated that they would vote “no” if a referendum were given. The local MP, David Heath, resigned from the Lib Dem front bench in the Commons rather than follow Nick Clegg's three-line whip to abstain.

What I had not foreseen was the impact of the Davis resignation. Annunziata found that Lib Dem voters identified most strongly with the Davis campaign, to the point at which Mr Davis seemed to be validating the Conservatives as a party prepared to fight on liberal issues. There seems to have been a similar reaction among Labour rebels, some of whom say they will go up to Haltemprice and campaign for him. Pragmatists may have failed to recognise the impact of his personal declaration or the strength of public feeling on libertarian issues.

For the Libs Dems themselves, there is a snag in this, or perhaps two snags. The first, as Lady Williams immediately saw, is that Mr Davis is not campaigning on right-wing issues, but on traditional issues of personal liberty. The second snag is that Europe is itself a liberal issue, but one on which the Liberal Democrats as a party are on the anti-liberal side.

If the Lib Dem peers had voted with the Conservatives in the Lords, the Lisbon Bill would have gone back to the Commons with a clause providing for a British referendum. We would not have had to leave our liberties for the Irish to protect.

The origin of the Lisbon treaty was the constitutional treaty, which was drafted by the European Constitutional Convention, which was controlled by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as its chairman. In the Convention, the democratic deficit, which was supposed to be eliminated, was deepened and entrenched.

The constitutional treaty was put to the vote in several European countries. Spain voted “yes”, but France voted “no”, as did the Netherlands. The European people do not want to transfer further powers away from their elected parliaments to the unelected bureaucracy in Brussels.

The EU responded to the French and Dutch votes not by recognising the public concerns about liberty and democracy, but by trying to avoid any public votes in the future. In every country except Ireland, this policy of avoiding democracy was successful, though there are still a few to come. The avoidance of a referendum was even successful in Britain, where all the major parties had committed themselves to a vote. Only the Conservatives honoured their commitment.

What may happen next? There will be an attempt to rescue the substance of the Lisbon treaty in some form or through some subterfuge. Brussels, like the Clintons, is extremely reluctant to recognise defeat. The European politicians want their legal identity, their extended powers, their president, their foreign minister. They want the status of a national state. But referendums will go against them, as the referendum went against them in Ireland.

The Prime Minister has no feeling for these developments in public opinion. He is creating an ever larger surveillance state and accepts the European democratic deficit. There is now no national consensus to ratify the Lisbon treaty and it would be a grave blunder to do so.

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