His button-badge-collecting obsession with the revived American right will serve him well, whoever leads the Tories after the next election.. Nowadays, if I want ideas, I don’t watch TV I go to a Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson installation. I spend an hour in a greetings card shop watching what women are buying I talk to my sister, who works in Sainsburys I walk or listen to music. The Diet Coke-drinking teetotaller would never admit it, but he probably felt a sneaking admiration for John Redwood’s freshness, clarity and Euro-scepticism. They will lead us to disaster at the next election, which we are going to lose anyway, and they will take all the blame for it. Then the right will take over.”But such ideological purists of the right are likely to find themselves outflanked by Finkelstein’s flexibility and fresh-faced charm.

After the Tory leadership election, Finkelstein said: “The right has to decide whether it wants to tack to the mainstream or move trenchantly rightward, which may separate it from the electorate.”Supporters of Redwood and Michael Portillo take the opposite view, that the voters would respond to a clear-cut right-wing programme. One said of Michael Heseltine’s elevation to Deputy Prime Minister with some satisfaction: “Now the SDP has taken over the Conservative Party. He was one of the convenors of a low- key seminar for centre-left Tories who wanted to be parliamentary candidates last September. The seminar, designed to counter a rival “high fliers’ weekend” organised by the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward group, was addressed by Cabinet ministers Stephen Dorrell and William Waldegrave.Finkelstein, an informal adviser to Dorrell, plays a central role as the ideologist of the Tory left. He insists that he cannot be categorised in internal Tory politics, and it is true that he has followed Lord Owen in a late conversion to an ambiguous brand of Euro-scepticism.

But the key test of the dividing line in the Tory party is one’s attitude to the electoral middle ground. Thus he will advance a minimum wage he doesn’t really believe in, support the Social Chapter as long as it doesn’t cost anything and mouth slogans about wanting to ‘renationalise the NHS’.”However, the old guard of the SDP are right about one thing Finkelstein would certainly like to be an MP. In any case, he says: “My criticism of Tony Blair is that, insofar as he wishes to push the Labour Party in the right direction, he will fail, because people don’t join the Labour Party to do those things. For example, ‘the Tories don’t care about the NHS’.”Finkelstein’s group of Social Democrats-turned-Tories were attacked by an older generation of anti-Owen former SDPers as careerists attracted to power and calculating – before Tony Blair became Labour leader – and that the Tory party was the best route to it. Finkelstein accepts that Blair is a social democrat, but by last year, Finkelstein no longer was.

As the editor of a business computer newspaper, Connexion, he was “very against the strike, went back to work and crossed the picket line”. He says: “I realised that my instincts were different from left-liberal journalists – with whom I worked and whom I liked. In order to be ‘on the left’, you accept a number of vague policy statements which are lazy and unsubstantiated. Finkelstein supports internal markets in the health, education and other public services, but as an alternative to wholesale privatisation. His admiration for Gingrich is more to do with the lessons for political communications of the “Contract with America” – the Republicans’ simple manifesto – than massive tax and welfare cuts.He comes from a high-achieving Jewish family in north London. His father, Ludwik, is professor of engineering at City University.