Will May heed Letwin, king of the clangers?

King of the Clangers and the Cerebral gaffer are just two of the nicknames that former Tory Cabinet minister Oliver Letwin has attracted in the course of his career.

now he’s writing a book about how the party should progress.

Hearts And Minds: The Battle For The Conservative Party From Thatcher To The Present, will argue that most politicians are capable of recognising their errors and learning from them.

He ought to know because he’s made more serious mistakes than most. During the 2001 election campaign, as a shadow Treasury minister, he claimed the Tories wanted to cut spending by £20 billion rather than the £8 billion they had stated.

His credibility suffered further when a BBC team seeking a comment found him dressed in a toga at a constituency event.

An architect of the poll tax, which was a major factor in the demise of Mrs Thatcher, Letwin was embarrassed when the DAVID CAMERON and Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable attended the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire at the weekend. An apt choice for one party leader who blew his premiership and went into the wilderness, while the other is desperate to return from it. national Archives released a memo he’d written for her in 1985 after the Broadwater Farm riots.

He blamed the disturbances on ‘bad moral attitudes’ and warned any extra money for the area would go to the ‘drug and disco trade’.

Then, in 2011, he was snapped by a photographer dumping constituents’ letters in litter bins as he walked through a London park — on five separate occasions.

He had to apologise for breaching data protection rules after no 10 said it was ‘not a sensible way to dispose of documents’.

The West Dorset MP’s book is out later this year, but how much advice will May heed from Letwin? She sacked him as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in her first reshuffle, so probably not much.