“So tell me,” said a senior Tory MP last Tuesday, as we stood in a crowded function room off the House of Commons, “What’s it like to be mingling with the Right Wing of the Conservative Party?”

I looked at him, and thought I detected the scintilla of a twinkle in his eyes.

“I think they’re all pretty ghastly,” I answered and – suitably emboldened – added: “They all bear ill-fitting clothes, florid faces, bad hair, big tummies, and no resemblance at all to the Britain I know.”

He nodded, more serious now.

“You’re quite right of course,” he said, “They live in their own little world. It’s all very sad really. Not a single open mind among ’em. It is the in the nature of our political class today”.

The media haven’t often been kind to this MP – especially the tabloids. But he struck me as the sort of person so worryingly absent from the 2012 contingent at Westminster. A rebel, but an honest one: in the same mould as Frank Field, David Davis and Kate Hoey. Oddly enough, the last of these was also at the same function.

Ms Hoey has always been something of a hero of mine. The ‘do’ we were attending was for the Friends of Grammar Schools (a cause, along with fox hunting, she supports) and Kate remains undeterred by sleazy, blackmailing Labour Whips who frown their sanctimonious frown upon this sort of thing.

The host for this occasion – Graham Brady – is like me the product of a Mancunian Grammar School; but if the truth be told, he seemed to me closer to the Right’s smug polemic than the more interesting folk there…even though he alone had the bottle to resign his Shadow portfolio in 2006 when Camerlot dropped its commitment to the restoration of GSs.

An especially interesting attendee was the Deputy Head of a Devonian Grammar School. She too found the overwhelming sense of clubbable male mediocrity at the gathering something to be regretted. As Education Secretary Michael Gove made a brief entrance for a photo-opp with more Grammar School activists, we both groaned as the local MP involved pushed into frame to ensure his inclusion in the snap. The man’s desire to be In the Picture – and thus given credit – was pretty unpleasant: as others at the function told me later, “He actually had nothing at all to do with the creation of that new school”.

But above all, the gathering of this large Tory minority was taking place a mere 95 miles away from the meltdown of the United Kingdom’s biggest trading partner, and in the context of a global mistrust of politicians exceeded only by the entirely self-interested and pernicious minority of human beings engaged in running investment banks and globalist multinational concerns. You really could’ve been forgiven for thinking that the occasion might be a celebration of the UK’s bright and rosey future in a world where unparalleled growth offered untold opportunities for Britons of all classes.

And so it is that the disconnect between we of Us and those of Them grows ever wider. As I posted earlier today, only the likes of Spain and France can now stop the sad success of the Tiny and Barmy Minority. A close chum in London very wisely begged me to stop referring to this minority group as The Elite.

“That suggests the best,” he opined, “and that’s the last thing these low-lifers are”.