A rather wonderful thing happened in Tonbridge in Kent a few months ago. The county council had been given £1.6 million to introduce traffic safety measures. In its infinite wisdom, it

decided to use some of this money to extend an existing 20mph limit.

No, that’s not the wonderful thing that happened. In the public consultation that was held at the end of 2021, it was clear that a huge majority of Tonbridge citizens wanted to abandon the

scheme. The wonderful thing was that the local council actually took notice, and almost overnight the 20mph signs disappeared – or at least some of them did. Road safety campaigners were

its extreme, this is an argument for cutting speed limits to 10mph or even 5mph. Have you ever tried driving at 10mph? It’s almost impossible to do it for any length of time. And in many

cars it’s not that easy to drive at 20mph.

I got two speeding tickets driving along the Embankment in London for doing 22mph and 24mph. Was I causing any danger? No I was not. Laws only work when they enjoy the consent of the public.

People understand the need for speed limits. I’m not some wide-eyed libertarian who doesn’t believe in regulating driving, but there’s little point in introducing such restrictions when

drivers ignore them and pedestrians can’t predict how fast a driver will be driving.

It’s fine to put lower speed limits outside schools or old people’s homes, or even on busy shopping streets where people cross the road more often, but to impose them on a dual carriageway

or main A-road is the transport equivalent of political correctness gone mad. I know transport planners have a job to do, but to constantly kow-tow to the anti-car brigade, as many local

authorities have been doing without even consulting the public, is not just infuriating, it is counter-productive.

Still, however, 20mph zones are spreading. The Welsh government is abolishing 30mph limits and replacing them with 20mph zones. Surrey County Council is planning to introduce 20mph limits on

some formerly 60mph rural roads.

There has been no public debate about this and precious little formal consultation, no doubt because they saw what happened in places such as Tonbridge. Local politicians in Surrey and

national politicians in Wales will rue the day they introduced this mad policy.

There was a time when Cabinet ministers vied to be appointed to the position of Conservative Party chairman. It was considered the best job outside the three great offices of state. Think

back to the 1970s and 1980s when Lord Thorneycroft, Cecil Parkinson and Norman Tebbit held the post. They were big hitters. They knew the party and had the ear of the party leader.

Fast forward a couple of decades and, with one or two exceptions, the party has had a succession of mediocrities chairing it. It’s the position prime ministers appoint people to when they

can’t think of anywhere else to put them. Oliver Dowden was given the job by Boris Johnson last year and was always a failure waiting to happen. Mr Dowden is a talented politician but he is

a policy wonk and was unsuited to acting as a lightning rod for the Prime Minister or to election campaign planning.

It’s time the role of party chairman took on greater importance, filled by a big hitter. John Strafford, a veteran party worker, has even been campaigning for the chair to be elected by the

members – perhaps as one way to make it more attractive to ambitious Tory MPs.

When Strafford put this idea to Liz Truss, somewhat surprisingly she said she didn’t think it was a bad idea, but I doubt it will ever happen. Conservative MPs might well think it a good

idea if the power to elect a party leader was returned to them, as a quid pro quo, but just as a prime minister and a chancellor need to sing from the same hymn sheet, so do the party leader

and the party chairman.

It has been suggested that a way of moving Priti Patel out of the Home Office would be to offer her a beefed-up role as sole chairman of the party, without someone like Ben Elliot or Andrew

Feldman looking over her shoulder. Well, it’s a thought.

I’m spending this week away from the radio studio on a busman’s holiday at the Edinburgh Fringe, where I’m hosting a show called Iain Dale All Talk, interviewing political luminaries on

stage in front of (hopefully) rapt audiences. There’s a real appetite for people to see politicians in the raw, with no filter. On Sunday 630 people turned up to see Rory Stewart. Tomorrow

it’s Nicola Sturgeon’s turn and on Friday, Keir Starmer.

And of course on Thursday The Telegraph will be hosting its leadership hustings in Cheltenham. So far all the hustings have had audiences which have eclipsed the numbers attending in 2019,

when I was hosting them. There may be a link there!