Nick Timothy is not a man who lets setbacks shake his confidence. He was one of the two special advisors who followed Theresa May from the Home Office into No 10 as chief of staff, and was the mastermind of May’s 2017 general election campaign.

Most people remember that election as being transformational of May’s political career – when she launched it, she was riding high, vastly more popular than her party, and was expected to win a landslide. Thanks to the manifesto Timothy wrote, and the campaign he masterminded, she barely clung to power.

Timothy has, nonetheless, continued to be regarded as one of the masterminds of the modern Conservative Party and has since become one of its MPs – and such is his regard for his own abilities, he evidently decided he was able to glean people’s immigration status with nothing more than a brief glance at them in a photograph.

At the weekend Timothy quote-tweeted a picture of a Deliveroo worker surrounded by police outside a group of people protesting or mobbing a hotel housing asylum seekers, accusing the police of acting to “facilitate illegal working” for a company that “depend[s] entirely on illegal immigration”.

Other, lesser MPs might have waited to know basic facts before weighing in on a sensitive issue, especially given the violent riots outside asylum hotels last summer, but Nick Timothy didn’t let that hold him back – forcing the Metropolitan Police to weigh in directly.

“This person was delivering to the hotel, they were not being accommodated there,” they wrote. “There is no evidence to suggest they were working illegally. They were then surrounded and intimidated by those gathered outside and officers intervened to make sure they got away safely.”

In other words, when police protected some just doing their job from a mob intimidating them, a Conservative MP sided with the mob without waiting to collect even basic facts. An MP with any decency would surely issue a grovelling apology to all concerned. Timothy has deleted his post, but the word “sorry”, alas, seems to be beyond his reach.