http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/28/daniel-hannan-tory-mepThere was no link yesterday from the official Conservative party website to the internet sensation of the week: a speech by the 37-year-old Tory MEP Daniel Hannan denouncing Gordon Brown as a "Brezhnev-era apparatchik".
By yesterday the speech - which Brown had to sit through after his own address to the European parliament - had passed 1.1m views.
For Hannan, it was a triumph. For David Cameron, a headache - proof that not all parts of his party have changed.
Opinions vary as to why the speech was a hit. Hannan says it shows how the internet is changing politics, since it was ignored by the press and TV.
At just over three minutes it was perfect for the web, and its tone caught the outrage of the right on both sides of the Atlantic, convinced that it must stop the big spending Brown-Obama juggernaut. Hannan's speech was linked to on the US Drudge Report website and he was quickly interviewed on Fox News.
He has not arrived out of the blue. Elected to the European parliament a decade ago, he irritated top Tories from the start by speaking out critically at a joint meeting of MPs and MEPs - "Who is this Hannan man?" one former cabinet minister asked angrily afterwards.
At Oxford in the early 1990s his fierce anti-Europeanism was influential. When a bust of Ted Heath was due to be unveiled at the Oxford Union, Eurosceptics hid it, and Heath was enraged.
"He's a free market nationalist and issue-for-issue agrees more with Ukip than Conservative policies," says Mark Littlewood, an Oxford contemporary who, like Hannan, now blogs for the Telegraph. The MEP was once also a leader writer there.
Hannan is no typical little Englander. Born in Peru, he is multi-lingual. Some find his style absurd: for a while he ended speeches in Latin calling for a vote on the Lisbon treaty: "Pactio Olisipiensis censenda est."
Others may dislike him quoting Enoch Powell last year - "we were a nation once; we are not now."
It is certainly a long way from Cameron's compassionate Conservatism.