IN a hot basement room in Liverpool, Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the prime minister’s most trusted fixer, was regaling delegates at the Labour Party’s annual conference with stories of how the landslide victory in July had been won. As the campaign co-ordinator, Mr McFadden had spent endless days with Morgan McSweeney, another aide, plotting the destruction of the Conservative Party in a tiny windowless office they termed “the cell”. It was when pizza was passed through the door, they realised they really were prisoners, he joked.