Howard’s Conservative party has made astonishing progress in a very short time

Just before the 1966 World Cup the England manager Sir Alf Ramsey remarked that his talented midfielder Martin Peters was ‘ten years ahead of his time’. Peters himself was displeased by the observation, but Ramsey was in reality being flattering. He meant that his player was not truly at ease among the clodhopping defenders and midfield ‘hard men’ who set the tone in the 1960s. Peters’s fluid, complex, visionary style anticipated an era that had not yet arrived.

Very much the same can be said of Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor. To the more primitive type of Tory back-bencher, Letwin is the object of contempt. Letwin refuses to use soundbites, the mind-numbing currency of contemporary debate, though attentive readers of his thoughtful and well-written speeches will find witticisms and the occasional epigram. The stupider type of MP, wedded to the conventions of the very recent past, takes this as an affront.