I’m pretty hard on conservatives in general; I don’t have much patience for their “small-c” conservatism and even though I’m actually more socially conservative than much of the God Squad in the current Republican Party, I have zero tolerance for the ways in which social conservatives try to use big government to impose their ideas on everyone else.

So it’s unusual for me to have good things to say about most conservatives, whether they are American or British. But there are a few libertarian-minded, pro-liberty, pro-natural rights conservatives whom I strongly support, whatever my differences with specific parts of their manifestos. Daniel Hannan is one of them- an Oxford-educated journalist with a tremendous gift for words who really knows how to give one hell of a great speech.

Here is his appearance at CPAC 2012. It says something for the man’s abilities as a wordsmith that even though I’ve heard him tell some of these jokes like ten times in various other speeches, he still manages to make his material sound fresh, he’s still very funny and his metaphors are so solid and full of substance that you could practically eat them.

This is what a man who loves his country, his freedoms, and the enduring legacy of Anglo-Saxon liberty, sounds like when given the opportunity to speak from the heart: