Six years ago this week, I went to dinner with four friends. Three were journalists: James Lyons, Sam Coates, Tim Shipman. The fourth does something else; I’m not going to drag him into this tale.
Dinner was in the Blue Boar, a cornerstone of Westminster entertaining and then, as now, the sort of place you bump into all sorts of political people.
Which is exactly what happened that night. A senior person in the orbit of David Cameron passed our table. Spotting us, the person stopped to chat, gossip and trade information. Business as usual for Westminster, though what happened next was a little out of the ordinary.
First, a bit of context. This was May 2013 and Cameron was struggling with backbench Tory discipline. That month, 114 Tory MPs had rebelled to force a debate on an EU referendum, angry that the Queen’s Speech did not commit the Coalition to hold such a vote.
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