One of America’s most eloquent conservative writers makes the case for toppling the liberal consensus, and tells how an experience in Brompton Oratory drew him to the Catholic Church

Those who wield the cruellest pens in public can in private be the kindest of souls, as I once learnt as a junior reporter sent quaking to interview the acerbic columnist Auberon Waugh. He turned out to be charm itself. Sohrab Ahmari is cut from the same cloth. I had prepared myself for a bruising encounter with this Trump-supporting, conservative Catholic, Iran-born American controversialist, who has made a name for himself on social media with his punchy put-downs of anything and anyone woke, liberal or morally relative. But in the flesh – virtual flesh, he in an anonymous New York room high in the sky, and me closer to the ground in London where, five years ago, Ahmari was received into the Catholic Church at Brompton Oratory – the 36-year-old writer is all good manners and moderation.

Ahmari confesses at once that, though his Twitter persona is “much more combative and much less given to nuance”, that is just the nature of the social media beast. “And,” he adds, “I’ve developed an unbelievably thick skin.” Thick enough to see him through a much reported 2019 face-to-face clash during a debate in Washington with the more liberal (by the US’ polarised standards) conservative evangelical writer, David French, that has gone down in the annals of America’s “culture wars”. The row had started with Ahmari’s Tweet attacking as “transvestic fetishism” the introduction of “story hours” for children in a library in California run by drag queens.