Sipping a glass of chilled Pol Roger at The Spectator magazine’s annual summer party, the former Conservative Minister was in a surprisingly cheerful mood.
‘There’s too much doom and gloom about,’ he told me. ‘Starmer’s majority is shallow. He’s got a very tricky in-tray. In a few months, the problems will be piling up. The shine’s going to come off. We’ll be back in the game more quickly than people think.’
It’s not an isolated view. In the wake of their cataclysmic Election defeat, a significant number of Tory MPs have become inflicted by what can best be described as George The Third Syndrome. Or, for the more musically inclined, Hamilton Syndrome.
In the hit Broadway show of the American Revolution, the recently deposed – and delusional – British monarch performs a comic turn. ‘You’ll be back,’ he croons to his ungrateful former subjects. ‘Soon, you’ll see. You’ll remember you belong to me.’
Two hundred and fifty years later, the citizens of the US have yet to demonstrate any such buyer’s remorse. And unless the Conservatives quickly come to appreciate the depth of the hole they’re interred in, they could be facing a similar period of exile.
Such introspection should begin with an acceptance they have underestimated Sir Keir Starmer and his party.
During the Election campaign, Labour’s strategy of minimising its political exposure saw Tory Ministers and advisers starting to believe their own negative publicity. ‘Labour’s got no plan,’ one told me. ‘They aren’t ready for power.’
They were. Starmer and his team haven’t so much hit the ground running, as opted to stride into government with a slow but steady purpose.
As his exhausted aides dozed on the overnight flight to Washington’s Nato summit, the man the Tory attack ads claimed would be ‘a part-time PM’ worked diligently through a mountain of briefing papers. ‘He stepped off the plane straight into ten separate meetings with our most senior global allies,’ one adviser revealed. ‘He didn’t want to waste a second.
‘To be honest, we’re all shattered from the campaign. But he’s been on it since the moment he walked through the door of No 10.’
As a result, Starmer has already cleared the first hurdle. He looks the part. At his first diplomatic gathering – one that didn’t involve the usual ceremonial glad- handing, but the development of a serious strategy to prosecute the war in Ukraine – the Prime Minister appeared confident and statesmanlike. Though given the obvious infirmity of Joe Biden, that wasn’t necessarily hard. But this sure-footedness has been matched across government.
Rachel Reeves’s appointment as Chancellor was greeted by stability in the stock market, and a strengthening of the pound. A testament to the work she and her team did reaching out to and reassuring business leaders in the months preceding Labour’s victory. New Defence Secretary John Healey won immediate praise from Ukrainian officials after he braved a Russian missile attack to sign off a new military aide package.
So while difficult days lie ahead, the idea the Starmer administration would rapidly collapse under the weight of expectation and events is set to prove wide of the mark.
The second thing the Tories must recognise is that when things do start to go wrong for the Government, they will not be in any position to exploit them.
There is a skill to being an effective opposition, and it is already evident it will take the Conservative Party a long time to relearn it.
Look no further than their preposterous response to the unfolding prison crisis, and Labour’s decision to reduce the proportion of custodial sentences served from 50 per cent to 40 per cent.
‘In what world is releasing 20,000 prisoners on to our streets a good idea?’ raged former Security Minister – and leading Tory leadership contender – Tom Tugendhat.
The answer is the world the Labour Party inherited from Tugendhat and his colleagues just over a week ago.
Every single man, woman and lag in the country knows the collapse of our penal system occurred on the last government’s watch.
In November, Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England, ordered sex offenders and burglars be spared jail because the scale of prison overcrowding had became unsustainable. So former Tory Ministers complaining about early release is like Dr Crippen complaining about poor food hygiene.
Yet there’s something even more important that vanquished Tory MPs need to grasp. Which is that they’d better pray long and hard Keir Starmer stays in command of his government. At least in the short term.
Yes, there will inevitably be a point where people become bored, then disillusioned, with Labour. But if that day arrives too quickly, it won’t be the Tories who benefit.
Starmer’s landslide was indeed shallow. Because, after 14 years in power, antipathy towards the Conservatives ran so deep. To eject them from office, people were prepared to vote for just about anyone. Labour. Reform. Lib Dem. Green.
In South West Norfolk, independent James Bagge described himself as a member of ‘the Turnip Taliban’, and said he would rather see a lettuce as the local MP than Liz Truss. He secured 6,000 votes, and she was ousted.
If and when Starmer falters, people won’t suddenly say, ‘Damn, we got that so wrong. Where are Jacob Rees-Mogg and Grant Shapps when you need them?’ They will look to express the disillusionment and anger elsewhere.
And we all know who reaps the rewards when voters turn against the Establishment. Nigel Farage has already made waves in Westminster with his unparliamentary attack on former Speaker John Bercow during last week’s Speaker Election.
And as a Farage ally told me: ‘We’re not going to be constrained by convention. We’re going to respect tradition but we won’t be bound by it. The House used to be rowdy and forthright, until it was blunted by conformism.’
So watch Parliament. And the polls. And any sudden by-election tests. And next year’s local elections. Because my bet is that, within the year, Reform will be regularly outperforming the Conservatives. And if support for Labour does begin to crumble, it will be the Farage insurgency that will be boosted, rather than our broken and shell-shocked former government.
‘You’ll be back like before,’ Lin-Manuel Miranda’s regal creation predicts in Hamilton. ‘I will fight the fight, and win the war.’
But he never does. And unless blind optimism is swiftly replaced by some hard-headed realism, neither will the Tories.