THE beauty of an election is that it allows you to consider things deeply. Am I voting out of fear of the past or hope for the future? Am I voting out of narrow self interest or for the wider good of the country? Am I voting because I don’t like the way someone eats a bacon sandwich or because I like the content of their manifesto?

Which, naturally enough, led me to ponder on the meaning of that Italian-sounding word, "manifesto". So deeply, in fact, that I even discovered why a Tory is a Tory, a question which has long troubled me.

“Manifesto” comes from Latin, and it means a public proclamation that is clearly revealed – I think there’s something to do with it being clearly visible in the hand, or “manus”, in there.

Political manifestos are a 20th Century phenomenon – Labour issued the first manifesto announcing a party-wide set of policies that all candidates adhered to in 1906, and the Conservatives didn’t get round to centrally printing a manifesto until 1935.

Prior to that, manifestos were letters the party leaders wrote to their local constituents laying out their personal policies, which the other candidates across the country fell behind. The first, and most famous, of these letters was Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 in which he outlined to his Staffordshire voters how he was creating a newly pragmatic Conservative Party to replace the old-fashioned Tories.

The Tories had opposed the 1832 Great Reform Act, which allowed more people to vote, and so they were widely hated. For instance, the Earl of Tankerville and Lord Malmesbury voted against the Act in late 1831 and then journeyed north, breaking for lunch in the King’s Head Hotel, Darlington. As they continued up Northgate “a storm of stones assailed us and a furious mob tried to stop us”, and Malmesbury had to unceremoniously stuff his wife under the seat as a paving stone smashed through the coach window. The Darlingtonians, in the most violent way, were expressing their hatred for the anti-reform Tories.

The Tamworth Manifesto accepted the reform, and the name of the party gradually changed – just as New Labour once replaced old Labour – to indicate this new outlook.

So why were the Tories “the Tories”? In the late 17th Century, a group of politicians tried to prevent the king’s brother and heir, James, the Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne because he was a Catholic. Their opponents rudely nicknamed them “whiggamores”, or whigs, after a rebellious group of Scottish Protestant peasants.

The Whigs retaliated by seeking an even ruder nickname for the king’s supporters. Noting that many of them were Irish Catholics, they tried “bogtrotters”, but the name which stuck was “toraidhe”, pronounced “Tory”, after a rebellious group of 16th Century Irish Catholic peasants.

While it is a shame that David Cameron is not the leader of the bogtrotters, I am pleased to have explained this derivation of "Tory", at least to myself.

And it shows how things have changed in 300 years. Today, we’d never get one set of politicians trading rude words and insults with another set of politicians while the bemused public looks on – or is that the definition of a 21st Century election?