“Now is not the time for blame”, the Conservative activist and journalist Annunziata Rees-Mogg suggested to her colleagues at the start of the ‘Popular Conservatism’ conference on Tuesday.

It was not a suggestion which any of them seemed willing to countenance.

Instead, over the course of more than three hours, a series of unelected and recently de-elected Conservative politicians revealed a long list people and institutions they blamed for the fact that their own brand of ‘Popular Conservatism’ had inexplicably proved to be quite so unpopular.

For the former Conservative minister and current peer, Lord Frost, the answer was quite simple. His party had been compromised by radical leftists pushing a “flabby mishmash of sub-socialist ideas”.

“On virtually every issue we have followed the collectivist Zeitgeist leftwards”, Frost told the room.

His former colleague and surviving Conservative MP Suella Braverman wholeheartedly agreed, insisting via video link from another hard right political conference in Washington, that her party had made the fatal error of trying to “mimic the Labour party”, while refusing to ever mention real Conservative ideals.

“We didn’t mention immigration,” said Braverman, who had mentioned next to nothing else during her time as Home Secretary.”

“We didn’t want to talk about it, we didn’t want to look at it.”

Later, an audience member suggested that this leftist infiltration had extended right into the heart of the Conservative party’s own campaigning machine, warning that Lib Dem sleeper agents must now be expelled from the party’s headquarters.