A Conservative politician almost nobody has heard of has been sacked for saying his party intends to make greater cuts in public expenditure than we have been led to believe.

Every general election has its defining moment, some incident plucked from the relentless debate that later comes to symbolise why one party lost and another won. Perhaps 20 or 30 years from now we will look back at May 2005 and say to ourselves wistfully — Ah, yes. The Howard Flight election: that was a good one.

Michael Howard’s intention in sacking Mr Flight from his post of deputy chairman was presumably to stop such a thing happening; to expunge the country of any memory of Mr Flight. Unsacked, Mr Flight would have been harried and pursued every waking hour for the next week or so. And at the end of that time there would be lodged in the mind of the public the notion that the Tories can’t be trusted, they’re not telling us the truth about their spending plans — no matter how often Mr Flight publicly grovelled and recanted (which he has already done).

Mr Howard would look a little weak for tolerating such a blithe dismissal of party policy at this crucial time. So I suppose it was right to kick him out of his post.

During the election campaign four years ago, Oliver Letwin, a member of the shadow Treasury team, drifted similarly off-message and was indeed most vigorously harried and pursued.

He was not found by the press because Michael Portillo, the then shadow chancellor, locked him in a suitcase for four weeks and refused to let him out until the campaign was over.

Letwin simply disappeared from the face of the earth and was not seen until every vote had been gathered in. This, incidentally, is what Labour has done with Gerald Kaufman at every election since 1979, for different reasons.

Another member of the shadow Treasury team back then was a certain Mr Howard Flight, which perhaps offers us a clue as to why he opened his mouth so entertainingly last week. Perhaps he thought he would be afforded the same sort of treatment as that meted out to Mr Letwin and quite fancied the idea.

I think we would all prefer to spend four or five weeks locked in a suitcase than hare about the country, devoting every last joule of human energy to haranguing uninterested or hostile voters. But if he thought that, he was wrong.

For this time around the Conservative party is led by someone with cojones who will, what’s more, slap them out on the table. At least when advised to do so by Mr Lynton Crosby.

So Mr Howard did not merely sack Mr Flight: he has also disbarred him from standing as a Tory MP. Short of sequestering his assets and ordering a cull of his first born, it is hard to imagine a more profound overreaction.

More remarkably, the Arundel and South Downs Conservative Association declined to man the barricades in support of its chosen candidate. Its chairman ran up the white flag as soon as the call came through from Conservative Central Office. Flight looks as if he is out, friendless and, I daresay, very bitter.

All of which will be a problem for Mr Howard. The second, draconian sacking will make Flight more difficult to forget than if he’d simply been deprived of his deputy chairmanship. I suspect he will not allow us to forget him over these next few weeks.