More than Madonna’s mother-in-law

I am wandering the gilded streets where it all began. A few hundred yards from here a handful of clever, public-school-educated young men met of an evening to discuss how best to transform the thing they loved, the Conservative party. They would meet for something called ‘supper’, apparently. Yes, I am in that little, extortionately expensive triangle of west London between Kensington and Notting Hill and I have the scent of history in my nostrils. Well, it’s either history or truffled polenta — hard to tell at this time of day.

I’m here to meet a woman called Shireen Ritchie. Those youngish men who met for supper in Notting Hill decided that the party they loved should no longer be perceived by the rest of us as being implacably opposed to everybody in the country apart from corpulent middle-aged white men with bad breath and braying accents. It should try to be a little more inclusive; it should embrace women and black people, for starters, regardless of whether women and black people desired to be embraced (of the 450 hopefuls who have applied for a place on the priority list only a quarter are women).