On Wednesday night, as Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt answered questions from the public via a live stream on the party’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, it marked a new digital dawn for the Conservative party. Yet the tight-knit team behind the online activities of many of its MPs is not quite what you might expect.

Mostly hailing from Essex and with little or no interest in politics, the ‘digikids’ responsible for most of the social posts – amid mystery surrounding *that* photo earlier this week of Johnson and Carrie Symonds in a pub garden – could not be further removed from the Westminster bubble.

Craig Dillon, 27, who left Sky News to found Westminster Digital last year, refuses to reveal exactly which campaign videos they worked on although their website suggests they have advised Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss, among countless others. Observing the rise of social media in the US presidential election – and recognising how “terrible” British politicians were at online self-promotion – he quickly assembled a seven-strong team of millenials.

“MPs were just getting it so wrong,” he says by way of explanation. And “they’re still getting it wrong,” adds communications manager Tom Dixon. “Last month we produced two almost identical videos. One goes on YouTube and one is the video posted on Twitter. The one posted on Twitter got 50,000 views, the one on YouTube got 700.”