Fraser Nelson

The three most magnetic politicians at this year’s Tory party conference are the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the leader of the Scottish Conservative Party.  I never thought I’d write this sentence but Ruth Davidson’s rise has been quite extraordinary. She has been campaigning for three years now: the Scottish referendum, the general election and Brexit. Now she doesn’t have a big fight planned, but she does still have plenty of energy. I just interviewed her during a fringe meeting to a packed room, and you could see the extent of her appeal. 'The selfie queen', quipped one Cabinet member earlier: she’s the type of politician that gets stopped by people who want their picture with her.

Six years ago, Matthew Parris suggested in The Spectator that David Cameron’s first act of parliament should be the Blanket Repeal of Legislation (Failure of New Labour, 1997-2010) Bill. That would have been a repeal bill worthy of the name. Theresa May’s proposed 'Great Repeal Bill' is not. Brexit we know about: that decision was taken on 23 June. But beyond Brexit, the Bill won't repeal anything. On the contrary, it will 'convert existing EU law into domestic law' so it is about continuity, rather than annulment. It should really be called the Great EU Regulation Continuity Bill. Nothing wrong in that; it's necessary legislation. But why spin it as radical change?

Second acts in British politics are vanishingly rare these days and Liam Fox, restored to the cabinet by Theresa May, is determined to make the most of his. We meet at his central London flat at half-past four on Sunday afternoon and even then the International Trade Secretary is beavering away: preparing for his meetings at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva the following day and finishing off his conference speech. He offers us a drink — red wine? pink champagne? — but pours a cup of tea for himself. Fox, as ever, is full of fizz. He clearly loves being back at the centre of things, and immediately starts contrasting Theresa May’s premiership with that of David Cameron. ‘We think similarly,’ he says.

Quite extraordinary scenes here at the Labour Party conference. I’m typing this in the main conference hall and have just watched Mike Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement give a short speech against anti-Semitism. This ought to be utterly uncontroversial, but it has become a wedge issue between the two tribes who now make up the Labour Party. Between those who were members before May 2015, and those who joined after. There have two very different outlooks, and are at war with each other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msl8Hm0GZp0 Katz’s speech was cheered effusively, like a rallying call, by about a third of the hall. And, amazingly, heckled by other members.

Now that Jeremy Corbyn has won, the fight moves to the jungle of Labour Party rules, regulations and procedures. Whoever controls these controls the party. Last Tuesday, for example, an eight-hour session of the party’s governing National Executive Committee (NEC) concluded that Scotland and Wales should each have their own member on the NEC. This seemed a bizarre, almost trivial outcome: so much argument and such a paltry outcome? The answer is simple: if the Corbynistas want to proceed with a purge of the Labour Party they’ll need a majority on the 33-member NEC. At present, power is balanced - but if there were Scottish and Welsh members then the moderates would have the balance of power. The moderates managed to win this argument.

Throughout the EU referendum campaign, we heard that Brexit would not only sink the UK economy but destroy the Union because Scots were likely to vote Remain. In the event there was a difference at the polls—38 per cent of Scots voted for Brexit, vs 52 per cent in the UK as a whole—but was it enough to destroy, or even threaten, the Union? Polls in the immediate aftermath showed an uptick for support for Scottish separation which has since ebbed away. Kantar TNS has today published a poll showing that 53 per cent of Scots are against independence, which confirms the YouGov poll taken at the end of August showing 54 per cent of Scots against. So this is pretty much where things were before the Brexit vote.

Is David Cameron trying to trash his own reputation? First came the worst resignation honours list for decades, which seemed designed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about his chumocracy. And today, he has handed a gift to those who denounced him as a career politician, someone with no sense of public service, whose interest in politics ran out when he thought it could no longer be useful to him. "Brits don't quit," he told us a few months ago: now he has quit, twice. After telling us several times that he'd stay, to fulfil a duty to parliament and his constituents. Even Gordon Brown fought another election after leaving No10 but Cameron has bolted, saying he has now decided that he'd be a “distraction”.

When Theresa May appointed three of the most outspoken and free-minded Brexiteers to her Cabinet, her fellow Remainers were delighted. Surely the only question is what they’d do first: implode or disembowel each other? Ever since, the speeches they’ve made have been seen through this narrative. First, David Davis was seen to have gaffed for pointing out that it's "improbable" that the UK stays in the European single market. And today, we have Liam Fox’s remarks to Conservative Way Forward about Britain's trade problem. A friend of mine was at the event, and took a video. Here's the transcript: CoffeeHousers can judge for themselves if his remarks are really so outrageous. "This country is not the free trading nation that it once was.

The parliamentary move against democracy is gathering strength. The notion that parliament might vote down the results of the referendum is being backed by some serious, intelligent politicians (and Labour’s Chris Bryant). My old boss Patience Wheatcroft is leading the attempt in the Lords, hoping to stall it until such times as another referendum could be called. Even David Lammy, who I also admire, is leading similar attempts in the Commons involving a petition (Rod Liddle, in response, has started a petition to have Lammy removed as MP. It now has 6,300 signatures). Bryant explains (in a tweet) that he’s out to defend parliamentary sovereignty. 'Our membership was by act of parliament and it needs an act of parliament to undo it.

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, said Abraham Lincoln. Theresa May faces a different question: for how long can you string along an entire electorate? She has been a defender of the pledge to cut net migration below 100,000 – a pledge that was adopted in a different era, before the Great Migration got underway. Cameron more or less got away with this – until he didn’t. During the referendum campaign, news that net migration hit 333,000 changed the debate and embodied the point under discussion. Cameron was haunted with this pledge throughout the campaign: how he’ll have regretted not dropping it when he had the chance. But will Mrs May? I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today.

The biggest puzzle of Theresa May’s premiership so far is why someone who pioneered laws against modern slavery and was so tough on stop-and-search should take such an extreme and heartless position on EU migrants. Her declaration – that she’d use them as bargaining chips in Brexit talks – struck many who would otherwise support her as bizarre and repugnant. The Times reveals today that this idea was dummed up, as you’d expect, by the Whitehall machine. Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, advised all candidates for the Tory leadership to use Britain’s three million EU nationals as bargaining chips in Brexit talks because he thought it would be the only bargaining chip Britain had.

Boris Johnson has spent his adult life being underestimated and sneered at. But today's attack by Tim Farron, the leader of what remains of the Liberal Democrats, rather takes the biscuit. Today it emerged that, with Theresa May in Switzerland and Philip Hammond out of the country, Boris is running the British government. So Farron pipes up to say: Putting Boris Johnson in charge of the country is like putting the Chuckle Brothers in charge of Newsnight. Still, at least if he’s here, he’s not in Rio offending everyone he meets – and there’s always Larry the cat to stop him doing anything silly. But Boris Johnson is arguably more qualified than anyone in any front bench to run the government.

When Theresa May was gearing up for a summer-long leadership campaign, she identified a worthy target: George Osborne’s addiction to easy money and the whole notion of quantitative easing. Rock-bottom interest rates and QE, she said, boost asset prices – and, in so doing, transfer wealth to the richest. When she became Prime Minister, the Bank of England decided to do another £70 billion of QE. We can guess that the effects will be the same as they were last time: more inflation and a surge of asset prices, making the richest even richer. As I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, QE is a magic wand of inequality. The problem is that no one understands QE, so it never gets the scrutiny it deserves.