Bob Geldof held forth. Martha Lane Fox, the dotcom moneybags, enjoyed Maurice Saatchi's canapés. Nicholas Coleridge, dandyish publisher of Vogue, got friendly with Laetitia Cash, the impossibly beautiful fashionista.

Just another Soho thrash for swanky metropolitans? Well yes, except this was in aid of an organisation hardly renowned for its funkiness: the Conservative party.

"There was a feeling of 'thank God, we've come back to life,'" sighs Cash, 30, a single mother, borough councillor and prospective parliamentary candidate for the "nasty party".

Nasty no longer. For a long time being called a Conservative was, in many circles, only mildly less crippling than being labelled a paedophile or a fan of Charlotte Church. Now it is okay for Samantha Shaw, a 21-year-old student at Leeds University, to admit she has a "shrine" to Margaret Thatcher in her digs.

She is not alone. Among an increasing number of twentysomethings, new Labour is the tired and unprincipled party of the Establishment, and Conservatism is an enticingly, exotic force to be flirted with and, perhaps, embraced.

Improbable as it seems, Conservatives might be learning to do cool as the political pendulum swings. Youth has always been contrary, and a young funkster can't get much more contrary than declaring himself, or herself, true blue.

These new Tories are the grandchildren of the Angry Young Men who railed against the stifling smugness of the Conservative ascendancy in 1950s Britain. Their parents shrank from the ruthlessness of Thatcherism and the sleazy chaos of the Major years. The new generation senses a new political stench: the decay of Blairism.

Rather than plaster their bedrooms with posters of the White Stripes, they have hit upon Boris Johnson, the Spectator editor and MP for Henley, who has acquired cult status after shambling performances on Have I Got News For You.

"The Tories are at the vanguard of extreme radical chic," he avers. "All those bare-buttock-exposing designers will soon come over to us. Jamie Palumbo is bound to do a rap song with Michael Howard and get him DJ-ing at the Ministry of Sound. New Labour went wrong because it was too self-consciously cool, with Tony Blair talking about his Fender guitar. It's strange, but the Tories really are the new cool: weird is in."

The party claims that Conservative Future, its activist youth wing, has more than doubled from a historic low of 4,000 in 1998 to well over 10,000 today.

This is not the Young Conservative tennis scene, the marriage club for on-the-make provincials who wore their parents' blazers and drank barley water on the lawn while seeking a social entrée into old Britain.

Head south of the River Thames to Cubana, a dive owned by the dashing Tory bachelor and sometime MP, Philip Oppenheim. It often holds informal drinks sessions for ordinary twentysomething Tories, students and first jobbers in the media. Not that you would guess many of them were disciples of Margaret Thatcher. Crewcuts and flares, not Eton fops and chalk stripes, are the uniform. Some are holding hands. And those are just the men. Tory boys aren't supposed to be gay boys. They rail against "the fascist state" for failing to legalise cannabis. Is this the party of Salisbury and Curzon or a Young Liberal disco? At last Harry Enfield's brilliantly ghastly Tory Boy, so often invoked when William Hague was leader, seems to have died.
So who are the new-model Tories?

THERE'S plenty of time to think in Hendersonville, a small town in North Carolina, where locals drive pick-ups with confederate bumper stickers and the Ku Klux Klan are considered nice guys. That's where Melissa Bean, 20, from Yorkshire, found herself two summers ago, waiting tables in the country club.