LONDON — Back in August 1996, sitting in a bar at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, a young Tory operative named Stephen Gilbert had an epiphany. The Conservative Party was doomed.

After 17 years in power, the party was not just going to lose the upcoming election to Tony Blair, Gilbert realized. They were going to lose by a landslide. Blair was Bill Clinton, sweeping all before him. They were Bob Dole.

On his return to London, the then 33-year-old Gilbert drafted a note for Conservative central office, according to a senior Tory who shared his analysis and was with him in the U.S. They wouldn’t like it, but the party needed to retreat from marginal constituencies and concentrate their effort on “safe” Tory seats if they were to stand any chance of avoiding a bloodbath.

His note was ignored. It was politically impossible for John Major to publicly abandon all hope of winning the election. The Tories slumped to their worst election result since 1906, with swathes of Tory blue turning red, submerged by Blair’s tide.

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Fast forward 20 years and Gilbert is Theresa May’s general election campaign supremo. He sits at the center of one of the most ruthlessly efficient and experienced campaign machines in modern British politics, watching a seemingly naive opposition flirt with the same mistakes his Tories made then, unaware of the disaster many pollsters now see as inevitable.

From the “central pod” on the first floor of Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) in Westminster, Gilbert is overseeing an audacious plan to do to Labour what Labour did to them in 1997.

In the 20 years since, the Tories have clawed their way back from just 165 seats to 330 under David Cameron, just shy of Major’s result in 1992. According to some of the more dramatic polls published over the last two weeks, the Tories are now on course for anything up to 400 seats in the 650-seat chamber. Even Blair’s former constituency of Sedgefield is a realistic target, according to one senior pollster who has crunched private demographic data.

Senior party officials, campaign insiders and Conservative MPs familiar with the Tory strategy, who spoke to POLITICO on the basis of anonymity, paint a picture of a meticulous, tightly-controlled and ambitious Tory campaign, focused on a victory they believe could reshape the British political landscape for decades to come. When approached for this article a party spokesman said Gilbert did not conduct interviews.

Such is the scale of the ambition at Tory HQ that the biggest threat, senior campaign insiders say, is complacency, both internally and across the country at large.

Any hint that staff are taking the election for granted is stamped on immediately. One campaign official said, only half in jest, that being caught looking at newspaper polls in the open-plan office is a sackable offense.

Tory through-and-through

This is Gilbert’s show.

Every morning at 6 a.m. the Tory veteran chairs a meeting of senior campaign officials at CCHQ, an imposing red brick mansion block behind Methodist Central Hall opposite Westminster Abbey.

Tory aides wonder whether Gilbert has the gravitas to take charge with Crosby, a dominant personality, still around.

Clutching coffees laid on by the party, May’s reelection team make their way into the wood-paneled Thatcher Room, which is closed off from the rest of CCHQ’s ground floor office. Inside hangs a portrait of the former prime minister, alongside two union flags.

Around the table sit Gilbert’s collection of all-star political operatives, hired guns from across the world: Lynton Crosby, the Australian campaign guru, and Jim Messina, the U.S. numbers man who helped propel Barack Obama into the White House, or one of his senior operatives if he’s not in town. Both helped Cameron win a narrow victory in 2015 but split for the EU referendum, with Crosby steering clear while Messina returned to help Cameron. Messina’s involvement failed to prevent Brexit. The U.S. campaigning expert did not predict the surge of support for Brexit among those who had rarely voted before. The miscalculation cost Cameron the vote — and his job.

Despite the problems over Brexit, both were brought back at substantial cost to the Conservative Party, who could not afford at such short notice to cast around for cheaper alternatives, one senior figure in the campaign said.

There for both campaigns was Gilbert — the loyal foot soldier. “One of life’s hewers of wood and drawers of water,” as one former Conservative cabinet minister said in a somewhat backhanded compliment. He got the job done without question, the Tory grandee said.

Gilbert first came into the party with the old cadre of Tory officials under the doyenne of Conservative elections Sir Tony Garrett, who headed the Conservative Party’s national network of organizers on the ground in the 1990s. Jo-Anne Nadler, a Conservative Party biographer and former activist who worked with Gilbert in the 1990s, said Gilbert was “unquestionably the most long-serving and experienced member of the in-house campaign team.”

His long-term service to the party was rewarded in 2015 when he was handed a peerage by Cameron, having served as the prime minister’s political secretary, acting as the link between No. 10 and the Conservative Party.

However, Gilbert’s career in the party is not blemish free. His loyalty to Cameron temporarily cost him his job as the party’s deputy chairman during the referendum campaign last year. He had incensed the party’s Euroskeptic right by combining his role with a part-time position at Populus, the official polling company for Britain Stronger in Europe, the main Remain campaign group. He resigned citing his “respect” for the party.

After the referendum he joined the U.K. lobbying firm Finsbury, but was brought back into CCHQ as soon as the election was called. “He never really left,” one Downing Street aide said.

The deep professional links between those running the Tory campaign have given it a head start on Labour for the June 8 election campaign, insiders say. They didn’t have time to think about it — they simply reassembled the team from 2015 and got back to work.

Andrew Cooper, the Conservative party peer and pollster who knows Gilbert well, said: “The campaign is run on autopilot. They all know exactly what they are doing.”

However, this time Gilbert, not Crosby, is in charge, in what experienced party officials and MPs believe is a return to traditional party structures of the 1980s, with long-serving operatives trusted with getting the job done having worked their way up from the bottom like May, who served as a councillor before moving into parliament, shadow cabinet, government and finally No. 10. However, this time, unlike 1997, the Tory Party has brought in cutting-edge data and the best campaign gurus from international politics.

Those who know Gilbert reject any notion that his appointment above Crosby — the Australian attack-dog who was given complete control of the 2015 election by Cameron — will lead to a softer, less ruthless campaign. “Stephen Gilbert is basically the modern Conservative Party,” one senior official close to the campaign said. “He has been central to so many Conservative campaigns.”

One senior Tory MP with a long history in Conservative Central Office said May’s team didn’t want Crosby in charge because they wanted the prime minister front and center, “not some slick machine.”

“They want to preserve the notion that she is doing this reluctantly in the national interest and is not part of some slick campaign being run by some Cameron, [former Chancellor George] Osborne, Boris [Johnson, foreign secretary] acolyte using the aggressive tactics used in 2015,” the MP said.

“Stephen Gilbert has been around a long time. I see it as the restoration of the old Conservative Party. They will buy in the expertise they need and Lynton will have been top of that list.”

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Crosby may not be in charge this time but his right-hand man, Mark Textor, is central to the war effort.

Textor — “a polling genius” according to one insider — has a more prominent role, having only been brought in for the final few weeks in 2015. This time he’s in London for the duration of the campaign, working on constituency-level polling, testing key Tory messages in the heart of Labour’s traditional strongholds.

Joining them is Isaac Levido, Crosby’s Australian sidekick in 2015, who’s been brought back into the fold and will also be in CCHQ for the duration of the campaign.

Messina, who jetted into London last week but flew out again on Friday, is also back on board, bringing with him his firm’s “vast” data-gathering model, which was crucial to the Tory win in 2015 but conspicuously failed in the EU referendum.

Behind closed doors, Messina boasts that he has 1,000 pieces of data on every voter in the U.K., one admiring Tory official revealed. Using the credit-checking agency Experian, Messina knows where every target voter shops, what they buy, how they travel to work — and much more besides.

Messina and his operatives in the U.K. are busy rebuilding this model for May’s battle with Jeremy Corbyn, gathering data over the next couple of weeks ready for a big message push in the final month, two officials familiar with the campaign said.

Awkward footage also emerged of May out canvassing, with one voter caught on camera saying “no thank you” to a visit from the prime minister.

The model works out what people’s preferred mode of communication is — whether that’s email, phone, text or a knock at the front door — as well as who they trust to deliver the message. One voter might get a leaflet on Brexit from the prime minister. Their neighbor could get a text message on the economy from Philip Hammond, who runs the Treasury.

“When Ed Miliband was talking about five million conversations with voters last time, we were just laughing at them,” one senior campaign official close to Cameron said. After running a cutting-edge campaign in 1997, the Labour Party is now dismissed by their opponents as a band of gentleman enthusiasts. The Tories, meanwhile, have turned professional.

Joining Gilbert, Crosby, Textor and Messina at the top table will be May’s two chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Timothy has been given the job, alongside Cabinet Office Minister Ben Gummer, of writing the Tory manifesto, while Hill is acting as a temporary director of communications, after the previous holder of that position, Katie Perrior, quit amid speculation of a personality clash with Hill.

Digital communication experts Craig Elder and Tom Edmonds, who were credited with effectively using Facebook to target voters in 2015, will also be there, alongside Darren Mott, Gilbert’s deputy charged with preparing candidates for campaigning, Alex Dawson, the head of the Conservative research department, and Patrick McLoughlin, the party chairman.

Too many cooks

For all the confidence, question marks remain.

Are there too many cooks this time round? “The first rule of campaigns is you can’t run a campaign by committee,” said Giles Kenningham, former Conservative director of communications. The Tories tried that in 2010 and many insiders believe it cost them an outright majority against Gordon Brown.

Tory aides wonder whether Gilbert has the gravitas to take charge with Crosby, a dominant personality, still around.

There are also concerns about No. 10’s control-freakery. Can May’s team hand over to expert campaigners as Cameron did in 2015, or will May’s all-powerful chiefs of staff Timothy and Hill demand control?

One Liberal Democrat, who served as a minister in the previous coalition government with the Conservatives and spoke to POLITICO over the past week, also questioned whether the Tories had gone off too quickly. “They’ll never be able to sustain the rate they’re going out,” one former cabinet minister said. “It will turn, trust me.” A week into the campaign and the polls showed an increase in support for Labour, albeit still with huge Tory leads.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing since May called the snap election two weeks ago. Conservative officials infuriated journalists last week by telling them to get to Norwich for a rally, only to change the destination at the last minute and tell them to get to Enfield instead — at least two hours back in direction they’d just traveled from. Awkward footage also emerged of May out canvassing, with one voter caught on camera saying “no thank you” to a visit from the prime minister.

On policy, May has also showed signs of vulnerability. On tax, she has repeatedly refused to recommit to Cameron’s “triple lock” manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT. She is also under pressure to unpick her predecessor’s commitments on increasing the state pension every year by either 2.5 percent, the rate of inflation or average earnings growth, whichever is largest – a move which threatens the Tories rock-solid support among elderly voters.

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Despite a few early mishaps, there is a belief that the election is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rip up the rule book, to return the Tory Party to what it likes to think of as its rightful position as the “natural party of government,” able to win in all parts of the country for the first time since the 1980s.