As I never tire of telling this column’s several million readers, Socrates always seems to be at my elbow, hounding me with probing questions about what I believe and why I believe it. Famous for his insistence that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, Socrates is always insisting that we examine our beliefs, our ideas.

Here he was doing it again this week, at my elbow in my study (at my other elbow, offering a powerful intellectual contrast, and with a far wetter nose than Socrates’, was Voss my mongrel dog) asking me to examine my feelings about Zed Seselja.

“After all,” the towering Athenian probed, “it’s not as if you’d ever vote Liberal.”

“Liberals make your flesh creep (and mine too, incidentally). And yet a creeping admiration for Seselja has crept up on you. Explain yourself.”

Yes, horrified at myself, I have been wondering why I find something appealing about the senator’s infuriating, ultra-conservative, Christian failure to do what famously left-liberal agnostic Canberrans expect of him. His sins have included obstructing same-sex marriage, opposing the ACT’s right to choose its own euthanasia legislation and, most recently, sharing in the assassination of the mild-mannered Malcolm Turnbull in the hope of making the awful and radically conservative Peter Dutton, loathed by Canberrans, our prime minister.

This newspaper’s letters pages are always fizzing with angry denunciations of Senator Seselja, for he is exactly the kind of man the letters-to-the-editor classes love to loathe. He is stubbornly, eccentrically unCanberran.

But, examining my mood, I’m vaguely reminded by Seselja’s attitude to his electors (his disinclination to give them what they want) of Edmund Burke’s principled, intellectually agile 1774 Speech To The Electors of Bristol. That ripper speech remains one of the gospels of political thought. Arts undergrads of my golden generation, tackling political science, were always required to grapple with it.

The message of his speech, refreshing in today’s populist contexts, is that if they elect him to parliament (and they duly did) he is not going to do what they, the electors of Bristol, tell him to. Instead he will always do what his refined conscience and nimble intellect dictate. Burke wrote like an angel. Here is an angelic passage from his speech.

“Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him … But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure … They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

“This is all very well, Ian” Socrates nagged, “but the flaw in your argument is that Zed has probably never even heard of Edmund Burke and so is hardly likely to be morally and intellectually imitating that great thinker.

“Even if Zed has been to uni he will have done something dry and ruthlessly vocational, like commerce. His education has probably been uncontaminated by any deep thinkers such as Burke and myself.”

Voss (who from some angles looks eerily like Scooby Doo) nodded his support of Socrates’ insight even though, in his mongrel confusion and as stupid as an average elector, he thought we were talking about the Burke, Robert O’Hara Burke, of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition.

But I assured Socrates, and Voss, that I was not silly enough to think the senator actually knows anything about Burke. It is just that he, Seselja, is accidentally doing something Burkeian by obeying his own dictates instead of doing what trendily progressive Canberrans say he should.

Canberrans angry with him are raging that he has a duty, elected by Canberrans, to do what Canberrans want him to. But of course Edmund Burke (and as it happens this columnist, too) think that’s not necessarily what a parliamentarian should do, what he or she is for. What if he or she, the elected parliamentarian, is a better person than any of the members of the common herd that has elected him or her?

In fact, when I stand at the next Assembly elections (for I am weary of being a struggling self-funded retiree, and hanker for an MLA’s breathtaking salary and perks) my Speech to the Electors of Murrumbidgee will be very like Burke’s Speech to the Electors of Bristol. I will tell them that, compared with me, their candidate, they are a race of moral and intellectual pygmies and that they’re not to bother me once they’ve elected me. They must just trust in my enlightened conscience.

“Good luck with that!” Socrates gasped in admiration, alert to how my promised style of candidacy, like Zed Seselja’s obstinate and constituent-aloof style as an MP, will be refreshingly, daringly unCanberran.