A search party has not yet been sent out, but the politician formerly known as Peter Lilley, Tory deputy leader from 1998-99 and social security secretary in 1992-97, who used to convulse Tory conferences with cringe-making doggerel, has disappeared.
All that remains is a silent wraith of that name, making rare appearances on the backbenches. And all because he tried sensibly to water down their Thatcherite inheritance, as requested, and to depict the Tories as "generous and caring", opposed to privatising the NHS and education.
Historians may judge that his was the last serious effort before Michael Portillo tried to move the depleted Tories toward a more winnable centre ground. Peter Lilley had already demonstrated in office his almost Butler-like ability to give Toryism a human face. In 1995 he had fought off Treasury attempts to end payments to lone parents, not his only display of humanity.
Despite his house in Normandy, he is Eurosceptic enough to have been called a "bastard" by John Major. He is also Thatcherite in his economics. But he opposes capital punishment and disdains demagoguery. His only concessions to rightwing populism were his stormily applauded annual party conference verses.
Mr Lilley was clearly better in the cabinet doing deft things behind his concealing civil servants. Even ex-communist Sue Slipman, speaking as director of the national council for one parent families, admitted he never did anything "actively harmful to lone parents and has actually been helpful".
Once he was in opposition, he lacked the killer instinct to attack chancellor Gordon Brown without scruple as the shadow chancellor in 1997-98 and had to make way for Francis Maude, who did no better.
Kicked upstairs by William Hague to develop longterm policies as deputy leader, he only lasted a year when he unveiled them. He became a non-person as if dispatched to a Siberian gulag. He emerged, briefly, from oblivion in January 2000 when he displayed a degree of favour for the legalisation of cannabis. "It's very difficult to argue for the present situation," he said. "If somebody can find something better, I would certainly consider it." After Ann Widdecombe wrenched open the pandora's box which is the cannabis issue at the party conference it was thought that Mr Lilley considered publishing a pamphlet setting out the case for legalising cannabis.
Yet despite his brief reappearances, it was an unexpected oblivion for a stockbroker turned politician. Born in Hayes, Kent, in 1943, he was educated at Dulwich college and Clare College, Cambridge. An oil expert with stockbrokers Greenwell Montague, he blew the money he received when bought out as a partner on his manor in Normandy.
Although he came from a Liberal family, he became a Tory quite young, but was "too shy" to express his views at Cambridge. But as national chairman of the Bow Group in 1973-1975 he helped push the group to the right and urged Tories to re-embrace the Friedman economic principles which had been abandoned by prime minister Ted Heath. Elected for St Albans in 1983, he made his name initially as a rightwinger by co-authoring "No Turning Back" from which the hardline Thatcherite group took its name - a far cry from his new life on the backbenches.
In the runup to the London mayoral election in 2000 his flirtation with heresy had not gone unnoticed. He was even approached to chair "Tories for Livingstone" and confessed to the Cambridge Forum: "I was tempted but will probably vote for Steven Norris."
He has had to learn anew that other Tory rightwingers will not allow you to turn back.