These were not aims, but tactics. The party was squared with the implausible claim that Cameron would campaign to win as a Blairite but govern as a Conservative. Hilton's genius, his friends assured the Lobby, lay in understanding this, and convincing those vital few others who needed to be convinced. Yet there remains a painful contrast between how the Blairites behaved in opposition and Hilton's approach. The Blairite will-to-power was a genuinely self-critical reappraisal. Beliefs that had sincerely brought people into left-wing politics were either revised or rejected. Hilton's feat, on the other hand, has been to enable one segment of the Tory elite to sneer at their own supporters. For the "Nasty Party" was always understood to be them, not us.

Hilton married his fellow party apparatchik, Rachel Whetstone, then gatekeeper to Michael Howard as Tory leader, and now a PR flack for Google in California, where they both now live. Where Labour modernisers committed themselves to policies which forced them to renounce their previous beliefs, every modernising policy urged on Cameron by Hilton left the latter secure in his comfort zone. Whatever narrative-building purpose they were put to, progressive attitudes to sexuality, drug abuse or the environment have this in common: they were the opinions Hilton's circle had always preferred. They weren't hard decisions taken, or personal convictions renounced. In private life, Hilton had little time for Tories. In 2001, he even boasted that he had voted Green.

Moreover, not only did Hilton overestimate the achievements of Blair's governments, he failed utterly to counter Blair's politics. Hilton opposed such tactical successes as Michael Ashcroft and Lynton Crosby were able to achieve under Howard in the 2005 election. Nor could Hilton ever devise a truly convincing anti-Blair strategy - save for hoping that Blair's replacement by Brown would solve the problem. Indeed, Hilton's strategy is now more or less the one for which he damned Hague: one more heave.