The pint-sized Rasputin who could win it for the Tories

The Conservatives’ master strategist is more Estuary than Eton. Famously elusive, he is closer to David Cameron than anyone else — including George Osborne. With the election weeks away, who is the party’s secret weapon?

Indeed who is the secret Cameron weapon?

Anne McElvoy thinks it is Steve Hilton,Conservative strategy chief and founder member of the “new Tories”.

He has been called a “pint-sized Rasputin” because of his influence on Cameron. Voluble in the inner sanctum, he is stubbornly elusive elsewhere. He never speaks to journalists on the record and rarely appears at parties or fundraisers. Yet nobody in the know doubts how fundamental he has been in bringing the Tories back from a third election defeat to their best chance of seizing power in a decade.