Can the people around Rishi Sunak really be dim enough not to have anticipated that his reshuffle would go down like a lead balloon among social conservatives? It seems unlikely to me that Sunak’s Downing Street could be peopled by such clowns. Sacking Suella Braverman and bringing back David Cameron into a great office of state was an unmistakeable sign of Sunak’s true political complexion, amounting to two fingers up to the party’s winning 2019 coalition of voters.

So as we move, Sherlock Holmes-like, through the range of explanations, that leaves us having to consider the rather conspiratorial possibility that the Sunakites want to lose. Or if they don’t exactly want to lose, that they have at least reconciled themselves to the inevitability of losing and are now primarily concerned with shaping the nature of that defeat.

The flaw is that the Red Wallers might not be quite stupid enough to put up with such a plot

Sure, the No. 10 operation might well be panicking now that the negative impact of the shuffle – a drop of around five points more in the Tory poll rating and rocket-boosters under the Reform party – has been so immediate and so big. But it seems to me that their strategy is set now and amounts to a plan to try and save 250 seats or so. And part of that plan, so it seems, is to make sure those MPs coming back next year are overwhelmingly liberal-leaning Blue Wall colleagues.

The more than 60 Red Wall Tories who unexpectedly pitched up after the 2019 election can meanwhile get lost. They can take with them their oik-ish insistence that the party should honour its commitments to reduce immigration, chuck more criminals in prison and fight back vigorously in the culture war being waged by the identitarian left.

To coin a phrase, the Sunakites and Cameroons want their party back and if a term of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in power is what it takes to achieve that then they are reconciled to it. After all, the ancient King of Liberal Conservatism Ken Clarke recently endorsed Reeves as a credible Chancellor-in-waiting, while Starmer has just passed a big foreign policy test by holding the line on Israel’s right to defend itself against Islamist psychopaths.

The liberal Tories who now rule the roost agree with Starmer and Reeves about much else besides: a relaxed immigration policy, adhering to the globalising of policy responses in many areas via transferring power to international bodies and treaties, much closer ties with the EU, a progressive and reformist criminal justice agenda and Net Zero at breakneck pace to name but a few key issues.

Many of these liberal Conservatives have looked at new colleagues from the East Midlands or Yorkshire towns – former miners and the like – and not enjoyed what they have seen one little bit. So one term of Starmer followed by a Tory win in 2028 under a Claire Coutinho or a Gillian Keegan – non-ideological managerialism delivered in a soft scouse accent – seems greatly to be preferred to stringent pro-nation state right-wingery of a kind that would appeal to older working-class voters.

If this is the truth behind the reshuffle then it is both breathtakingly cynical and also oddly principled. It is cynical in its readiness to throw the Red Wallers overboard with lead weights around their ankles, principled in that the Lib-Cons really do have more policy overlaps with Team Starmer.

Parliamentary politics has, in effect, been turned into an extension of centrist dad podcasting: George Osborne and Ed Balls, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell and now Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, clustering around a set of elite outlooks. Davos men to their fingertips, all.

If things go according to plan then these centrist Tory patricians will no longer need to have nightmares about their party falling into the clutches of a Kemi Badenoch or – worse still – Suella Braverman, with an ensuing torrent of socially conservative policies embracing patriotism, the family, migration control, personal responsibility and the rest of the Nat Con playbook.

There is the risk that liberal Conservatism is so unpopular in the country that it will save barely any seats at all. The most obvious flaw other than that is that the Red Wallers might not be quite stupid enough to put up with it. There are three score of them and maybe the same number again of like-minded colleagues such as Danny Kruger in rural Wiltshire or John Hayes in true blue Lincolnshire. And they only need to muster 53 letters to the chairman of the 1922 Committee to secure a motion of no confidence in Sunak and stop the plot in its tracks.