"I remember a bevy of girls called Pam, Pat, Paula and Sue," he reminisced in the Daily Mail in 1994, "with whom I would play tennis in Gladstone Park in the long summer of 1949. They wore short shorts with turn-ups, dinky white shoes and Aertex shirts."

Sir Julian certainly didn't attend the branch meetings in the "dingy" YC headquarters to admire the posters of Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill on the wall. Not when there was the far more appealing sight of "trim-waisted, long-legged secretaries, hairdressers, and budding journalists on Vogue magazine". If the young men of the Hampstead YCs played their cards right, he recalled, there was the promise of "fumbling in the backs of motor cars" or a goodnight kiss on the walk home from the Haverstock Hill tennis club.

Bolder members of the YCs ventured farther afield. Often several branches would club together to put on a ball or organise a trip to the seaside. In 1955, 200 YCs decamped to Scarborough for a dance at the Olympia Ballroom. It was reported that a good time was had by all but the planned midnight swim had found few takers. One poetically-minded YC wrote: "We left with only memories, snapshots and the cries of seagulls ringing in our ears."

But after the electoral successes of 1955 and 1959, the YCs became complacent and recruitment slowed. Membership in 1959 was only half that of 1950.

By the early 1960s, the YCs were looking distinctly old hat. In a telling sketch from 1961 called "The Blood Donor", comedian Tony Hancock explained that he wanted to do something for his country and found that he could either "become a blood donor or join the Young Conservatives. Anyway, as I'm not looking for a wife and I can't play table tennis . . . here I am." Youth culture had changed forever: ping-pong and a dutiful wife simply couldn't compete with Beatlemania, Mary Quant's miniskirts and Mick Jagger's lips.