No one quite yet knows what Andy Burnham will be like as Prime Minister. But a preview of the coming Tory critique is offered by Neil O’Brien, the man tasked with co-ordinating the Conservative Party’s policy offering. ‘He’s tended to go with the soft left all the time, WASPI women, always the sort of easy answers’, he says. ‘I just don’t see any fundamental reconsideration of the big choices that got us into this mess.’ Burnham might be ‘more deft’ than his predecessor – but there is little sign he is willing to countenance ‘some big break with Starmerism’ on Britain’s economic woes.

An Opposition criticising the government is nothing new. O’Brien, though, is refreshingly willing to hold his own party to account. Asked for the biggest mistake of the last Tory administration, he says instantly: ‘The level of immigration. I’m completely seared by it… the overall level of it was just radically too high.’ He admits that ‘lots of other small things’ went wrong ‘along the way’. He praises areas like deficit reduction and education where the Tories had a plan between 2010 to 2024 but highlights health as an area where it did not. ‘We just didn’t go in the right direction’, he says. ‘It’s not the fault of any one individual person, but collectively it’s a failure and we need to learn the lesson.’

Unlike many of his colleagues, the Leicestershire MP has some experience of what it was like to be involved in Opposition policy making before. As the-then director of Policy Exchange, he recalls padding the corridors of Norman Shaw North in the late 2000s as the Cameroons prepared for government. There is still an ‘active sort of centre right think tank scene in the UK’, he says, ‘all of Onward, CPS, CSJ, Policy Exchange, all still pumping out very, very good things.’ He suggests that now is a time to ‘think big – you sort have got to think big because things are pretty screwed.’

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O’Brien is the man entrusted by Kemi Badenoch to draw up the roadmap to the party and country’s recovery. He is one of a series of Tory frontbenchers, now in their late forties and fifties, who never reached the cabinet but is now keen to make up for the past. ‘When you read the memoirs of the people involved in the Thatcher years, you see how the failure of the Heath........

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