"With every crude attempt to appear normal and nice, these people become more ludicrous. Their pursuit of niceness is like Michael Jackson's pursuit of whiteness: everything they do to try to become that which they are not makes them slightly more grotesque."
Ouch! Amanda Platell's stiletto is as lethal as it is lovely. William Hague's spin doctor until the last election, she has never forgiven those - the reformed Portillistas, now (courtesy of Harry Potter) branded the Slytherins - for undermining Mr Hague even as he battled toward glorious defeat.
And as the ink dried on Iain Duncan Smith's shadow cabinet reshuffle on Tuesday night, Ms Platell twisted her heel on the re-invented Tory left she blamed for the humiliating demotion of party chairman David Davis after just 10 months in the job.
Certainly it wasn't hard to detect a smear campaign worthy of New Labour in the proclaimed emergence of his successor, Theresa May, as a victory for the party's "modernisers". Mrs May may be a thoroughly good thing, and it will hardly do the party a button of harm to have its first woman chairman. A moderniser she may be, though interestingly she eschews the politically correct title of Tory "chair".
Mr Davis may also, as friends as well as critics suggest, have been a somewhat lazy chairman. He also apparently opposed moves to force constituency parties to select more black, Asian and women candidates.
However it would be an extreme injustice to characterise him as some kind of ragged reactionary, the mean and enduring face of the nasty party ejected from office with such open distaste by the electorate in 1997. A man with more obvious charisma than IDS, this son of a single parent and product of a council estate would seem made of exactly the right stuff if the Conservatives are to reconnect with the millions of voters who have abandoned them over two elections.
Certainly it is hard to see why we should think Mrs May or front-benchers like David "two-brains" Willetts likely to prove more passionate, or more convincing, than Mr Davis about the reform of public services or the plight of people in Britain's sink estates and schools. No, the real reason for Mr Davis's demotion is almost certainly that he was considered a touch disloyal, and suspected of using his power base at Conservative Central Office as a potential springboard for a future leadership bid.
Mr Duncan Smith has surprised some by his willingness to wield the knife. His supporters, indeed, would have this exercise seen as proof of a tough, determined, ruthless streak with which the voters are barely yet acquainted.
Unfortunately this demonstration of strong leadership has also carried some mockery in its wake - targeted, as it was, against people inside his own party rather than at a government steadily losing public trust and peering into a sea of potential troubles.
"There was hardly anything very inclusive about the coup against the chairman," quipped one Tory yesterday, adding his own twist to Mrs May's resolve to carry to the country her message of the Conservatives as an open, tolerant and inclusive party, committed, above all, to the vulnerable. "Talk about special pleading," he complained: "Talking about it is all very well. Might be rather good if they were to do something."
Reflected in this is a continuing doubt about the direction in which Mr Duncan Smith actually intends to lead his party. The candidate of the right, this "Son of Tebbit", saw off the touchy-feely, all-embracing Michael Portillo in last year's leadership contest - since when he seems to have embraced much of the previously derided Portillo agenda for change. "Whether he actually believes in it, I just don't know," confides our Tory.
The Tory left has reputedly determined next May's local elections as decision time on Mr Duncan Smith's future. And that is surely inevitably so. For this is not the second year after defeat, but the second year of Labour's second term, with the Conservative Party doggedly stuck around the same level of support it achieved in 1997.
In Sweden on Monday, IDS tried to ward-off speculation about his impending reshuffle - insisting that this was summer speculation of the Westminster Village variety, of little real interest to the great British public. He might just have stumbled on a terrible truth.