I used to sit next to Quentin Davies at meetings of the European Movement’s Management Board, about ten years ago. He always seemed very courteous, and he was definitely a bona fide pro-European - but he is also very definitely a real Tory.

That makes him all the more valuable to Gordon Brown. Brown has been trying hard over recent months to close down the narrative which portrays Blair as the one who appealed to Middle England, and Gordon as the conscience of the Old Left within New Labour. Winning over a proper traditional old-style Tory, must surely be his ideal way to start his premiership (and clearly the timing of today’s announcement is not coincidental).

Davies will no doubt be a great start to Brown’s “Government of all the talents” - and I’ll be astonished if by the end of the week Davies is not a minister of some variety, or High Commissioner to Australia, or something.

His move is also of course yet another shove of the Cameron bandwagon off the rails. For his first year or a bit longer as Leader, it seemed that Cameron could do no wrong: all the momentum was with him. As I’ve noted before one reverse does not mean he’s lost the war, but the hole he’s finding himself in seems to be expanding.

Perhaps in the long historical retrospective Cameron will be able to write off the period just before and after Brown became Prime Minister, as a blip - the brief revival of New Labour’s fortunes. I’ve argued before that I suspect Brown will be popular for his first few months, when the focus is on all the new things he is announcing - but that a year into his Premiership, when all that has worn off, people will find it harder to see the Brown era as distinct from just an extension of the Blair period.

However it seems to me that many of the problems (other than the Davies defection, which perhaps is) that Cameron has been having, have not been of Brown’s making. Their root lies in the fundamentals of the Conservative party.

It was very good also to see Ming come out fighting today. I think his line that he plans to tackle the age issue head on is absolutely right - and the advantage of his point that experience should not be thrown over in favour of simple youth, is surely likely to become more evident over the next few months.