Theresa may

PMQs isn’t the total walk over it once was. Jeremy Corbyn has improved, albeit from a low base, and Theresa May hasn’t yet developed the mastery of the chamber that David Cameron had. Today, Corbyn led on the whole confusion over whether or not businesses would have to list their foreign workers. But May was fairly comfortable on her old Home Office turf. Corbyn then moved to Brexit, using May’s pre-referendum warnings about leaving the single market against her. May, however, had a decent line about a second referendum, saying that Labour MPs should know that you can ask the question again and still get the answer you don’t want.

People attack the whole business of having an EU referendum, but one of its pluses was that it invited millions of people who had never before been asked to form an opinion on the European question to do so. They responded thoughtfully — perhaps more thoughtfully than people do in general elections when a sizeable minority vote pretty much automatically for one party or another. We quickly developed a much more educated electorate. The idea, strongly touted immediately after the result, that the voters’ majority view could be set aside by Parliament because they didn’t know what they were talking about has almost completely vanished from political debate, with the noisy exception of interventions by Kenneth Clarke.

Mrs May’s plain style may well come to irritate people in a few months, but just now it is extremely popular. The lack of glamour, soundbites, smart clothes, and ministerial overclaiming is a blessed relief. I can’t pretend that I find Mrs May an endearing figure, but when she said in her speech that Britain should not go round saying ‘We are punching above our weight’ (a phrase beloved of the Foreign Office), I almost wanted to hug her. There isn’t even much party knockabout. In the old days, any speech which made some pathetic jibe against ‘the brothers last week in Blackpool’ could be guaranteed laughter and applause.

On Tuesday night, Conservatives for Liberty, which I co-founded in 2013, hosted our annual Freedom Fizz reception.  Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young joined us, along with 400 party delegates, most of whom identify as right-wing libertarians. So like a lot of Conservative Party Conference delegates, I woke up with a hangover on Wednesday morning, with the elation of the night before left somewhere in the bottom of one of several bottles of prosecco. What I didn’t realise at the time was that my day was about to get more painful. Twelve hours after we packed up, the Prime Minister effectively declared the lot of us enemies of the party - and the people.

 Birmingham Checking in to my hotel room on the 18th floor, for the Conservative party conference here, I opened the door and bumped into a workman on a stepladder. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘They shouldn’t have let you in. All the water came through from the room upstairs.’ He was painting over the damage. Then he looked at me, recognised me and asked, ‘Hard or soft Brexit, then?’ I burbled slightly, not being happy with the distinction, but eventually said I thought ‘hard’ better described what was needed. The painter told me he read the Guardian and the Telegraph every day to ‘get both sides’. He reckoned ‘hard’, too: ‘It’s got to be divorce.

Theresa May’s speech was an attempt to seize the moment created by Brexit and Labour’s lurch to the left. She tried to set out a new centre-ground politics, promising to stand up to elites on behalf of ordinary people.  She attempted to nationalise Clement Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister who presided over the creation of the NHS, hailing him as one of her inspirations and promised government intervention to fix the housing, energy and broadband markets. In political terms, the speech was clever. There are an awful lot of voters who will nod along with her criticism of a ‘sneering’ elite who view themselves as ‘global citizens’ and her demands that multinational businesses accept that they have obligations to the communities they operate in.