JUST an hour before he was to give the speech that wrecked his political career, Howard Flight was called by a senior member of Michael Howard’s office and warned to stay “on-message”.

Stephen Sherbourne, Mr Howard’s chief of staff, told the leader’s former colleague that Labour was looking for ammunition to use in the election campaign. “Make sure you stick totally to the line,” Mr Sherbourne ordered.

What actually happened later on Wednesday evening was decidedly off-message — and firmly on tape.

Mr Flight must have felt like a right-wing Colossus at the Whitehall club in Adam Street, in the bosom of the Conservative Way Forward group which still yearns for the restoration of Margaret Thatcher’s “conviction politics”.

Although he had been ousted as Oliver Letwin’s deputy in the Tory Treasury team, the party’s deputy chairman had set up the James Committee which identified £35 billion of public spending savings and had boasted that he would “continue to orchestrate it”.

To cheers and applause, Mr Flight told the gathering: “The real issue is, having won power, do you then go for it?”

The James recommendations had been “sieved” for politically expedient reasons, but there was the potential to go much further.

“Whatever the fine principles, you have to win an election first before you can actually get on with what needs to be done,” he said.

In a new Tory administration, Mr Flight said: “We’re back to the ‘wets’ and ‘drys’ and all that happened in the Eighties and be sure where I stand once we gain power in terms of putting my maximum weight in the direction we go in.”

But this hyperbole was soon to become hubris and Mr Flight was left high and dry. When The Times told the Conservative leadership 24 hours later that it had obtained a tape of his remarks, Mr Flight was swiftly forced to resign from his twin posts as party deputy chairman and City envoy.

Even then, the Tory high command hoped to limit the damage by insisting that he had quit voluntarily because he was a “man of honour”.

When Mr Howard spoke to him on Thursday evening he made no suggestion that further action might be taken.As late as yesterday morning, George Osborne, Mr Flight’s successor as Shadow Treasury Chief Secretary, was telling Radio 4’s Today programme that Mr Flight had quit and “done the decent thing”.

But by lunchtime yesterday, the Tory leadership had switched to panic stations. Mr Flight had not only been “sacked” from the front bench, he also had the party whip withdrawn and was banned from standing as a Conservative candidate in the next election. It was, said a source close to the leader, “game over”.

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