Half a week on, and there is still no sign of another "radical thinker" stepping forward to fill the huge void in our lives left by the departure of Steve Hilton, the prime minister's 'Director of Strategy'. The talk is whether Mr Cameron, his government and perhaps the country, can survive.
Mr Cameron and Mr Hilton are old mates. Their relationship goes back nearly a quarter of a century to when they were young jackanapes in the Conservative Research Department with a tendency to upset that dusty institution's more conservative denizens. This was in the days when the institutional apparatus of the Conservative Party contained conservatives, an anomaly that Dave and Steve have spent the apogee of their careers trying to address. That Mr Hilton is to retire hurt to California, where conservatives are as rare as sleet-stained swimming pool covers, is an indication that he may consider himself to have failed in this uplifting mission.
Much has been written about Mr Hilton's departure - or, strictly speaking, "sabbatical", though unlike California's erstwhile governor he probably won't be back - which is not really surprising since being written about was what the Downing Street hobbit was for. A picture is worth a thousand words and Mr Hilton served as the life-model extraordinaire for a political lobby not overly-interested in exerting itself to write a story.
For all the millions of syllables that have been sacrificed in the hopeless struggle to portray what Mr Cameron is about, we only really got close to understanding what being a "modern compassionate Conservative" means when we were forced to contemplate the unprepossessing image of Hilton in the raw. Dressed invariably in rags and forced to move about the place on his unicycle, Hilton spoke to a population challenged by austerity where the need to spend the last of your disposable income on latte macchiatos meant there was nothing left over to afford the luxury of footwear. The bald head was a symbol of openness and accountability: not for him the unexposed dome of administration, furtive and conniving beneath the cranial merkin of official obsfuscation. We are told that under Hilton's sway it has become possible to discover more about local authority bin-collection rotas than at any time in our island history. No wonder they are casting about in Downing Street wondering how they are going to fill this extraordinary fellow's, er, shoes.
If you are detecting here that I am finding it hard to take the loss of Mr Hilton to Stanford University entirely seriously, you may well be right. For one thing, why does the prime minister need a "director of strategy" in the first place? Mrs Thatcher seemed to get by without one, as did, more or less, Tony Blair, though the latter would occasionally order in various rococco embellishments from World of MBA such as John Birt to do some "blue skies thinking" or Michael Barber to construct very detailed Powerpoint presentations stuffed with metrics. Neither of these innovations seemed to have much bearing either on Mr Blair's successes (eg peace in Northern Ireland) or on his failures (eg war in Iraq). I wonder what Lord Birt was thinking about all those years back, and has it come to pass? Did he, for example, forsee that it would one day be possible for Britain to become the tolerant society that could be represented in the Eurovision Song Contest by Englebert Humperdink?
The Cameron government for its part is not without its radical drive. Schools and welfare reform spring to mind, but credit for being bold in these spheres belongs to the ministers in charge, Gove and Duncan Smith respectively. Mr Hilton is equally innocent of responsibility for the reforms to the NHS for which deliverance I have no doubt he nightly gets down upon his knees to pray (assuming that this is still legal under the secular terror). His influence on George Osborne's strategy for economic growth is reportedly slight, which is something it has in common with the strategy itself. Meanwhile, the ideas with which Mr Hilton is most associated include elected police commissioners and mayors. Worthy stuff no doubt, though they have not left us a more noticeably empowered, radical or edgy nation, except perhaps in Hartlepool where they sensibly chose a monkey to lead their municipal politics. That was long before Mr Hilton's time in any case.
Since we are on the subject, it would be crass not to refer to Mr Hilton's boldest idea of all: the Big Society. Of this, it is sometimes said, it is a good idea that has not been well sold. This is political speak for what the rest of us know as a bad idea.
There are some who say that Mr Hilton will return in 2013, rejuvenated by the California sunshine, fortified by yoghurt and buzzing with ideas for the next era of Conservative government. It is hard, however, to escape the conclusion that the hobbit has had his chance. His years of buzzing around Mr Cameron left the party with a cool new logo and 20 seats short of an overall majority. The press will miss him. Is it really quite so certain that the same is true of the prime minister?