The greybeards are back, some in rumour but others in fact. The Conservatives deny reports that Michael Heseltine, aka Tarzan, is set to return to government in a putative Tory administration; but other veterans are likely to serve alongside Ken Clarke, now the shadow business secretary, who will be 70 soon after the general election expected next year. The infatuation with youth, which helped to secure the Tory leadership for David Cameron and that of the Liberal Democrats for Nick Clegg, seems to have waned-on the surface of politics, at least.

For Bagehot, perhaps the most intriguing overall lesson of the party-conference season was the extreme youth of many of those in important positions in the party hierarchies, making policy and conducting high-level negotiations. This is one of the hidden features of the political machine: the callow age of many of its cogs, including some big ones.

The office of George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, generates many of the Tories’ best ideas, and some less good ones. Mr Osborne himself is 38, stunningly young for a would-be chancellor. But he seems venerable beside his advisers. His fecund brains trust comprises Rohan Silva (28) and Rupert Harrison (30). Matthew Hancock, his chief of staff, has just turned 31.

It isn’t only the Osborne nursery. News footage of Mr Cameron on the night before his conference speech showed the leader conversing with his wife, Mr Osborne, William Hague (the shadow foreign secretary)-and Ameet Gill. Mr Gill is Mr Cameron’s main speechwriter. He is 27. The head of the party’s policy unit is 33. Interview a shadow minister and you will often find him accompanied by a scowling young press officer; it can be hard to decipher who is managing whom. Many of these rising Tory stars were inducted into politics when it was dominated by Tony Blair. They acquired a Blairite grasp of presentation and a focus on electability, as well as a reverence for new technologies.

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