Isabel Hardman

It would be extraordinary if a row about a pair of trousers had continued into a second week - if the row were just about a pair of trousers. As I wrote last week (when I thought the fight over Nicky Morgan’s comments about Theresa May owning a pair of £995 leather trousers was starting to fade), it was a curious intervention for a female politician to make about one of her sisters, especially when Morgan is an MP on a salary three times the national average anyway. But what this row is really about, as well as an ill-judged act of personal revenge from Morgan for being dispatched from the Cabinet by May, is about the way Number 10 and the Conservative Party is now being run.

Is Labour actually managing to do its job as a decent opposition? Yesterday, the party forced the government into a U-turn over whether the Prime Minister must reveal her plan for Brexit negotiations before triggering Article 50. This was over an Opposition Day debate, which leads to a vote that is not binding on the government, and is therefore normally safe to ignore. Ministers have been even more relaxed about these debates over the past few months given Labour has little political heft at the moment, and has on occasion used its Opposition Day slots as a means of internal party management, such as the debate on Yemen.

How much do the net migration figures mean these days? The Office for National Statistics released its latest migration estimates today, which put immigration to the UK in the year to June 2016 at a record high of 650,000 - up 11,000 on the previous year. Net migration was at 335,000. That figure comprises 189,000 EU citizens and 196,000 non-EU citizens who came to Britain, and 49,000 Brits who left this country. But these figures mostly cover the period before the EU referendum. The ONS includes three months of data following June’s vote in today’s release. And the estimates for the year that follows will also reflect Britain’s current immigration arrangements, not the ones that Britons voted for in the referendum, whatever those arrangements may be.

One of the crueller caricatures in the 2004 satirical film ‘Team America: World Police’ is a little puppet of Matt Damon who is only able to say ‘Matt Damon’ in a rather feeble and pointless fashion. The actor himself felt he was being cruelly parodied because of his opposition to the Iraq War, and was ‘bewildered’ by the suggestion that he was barely able to say his own name when he was able to learn entire scripts. But the point from the screenwriters seemed to be that beyond his own name, Damon wasn’t really offering anything to the debate about the war. Labour has a Matt Damon problem on immigration at the moment.

No-one envies the person whose job it is to respond for the Opposition to an economic statement that has just been made to the House of Commons. But perhaps John McDonnell’s job today was rather less terrifying given few people were seriously worrying about what he had to say.  The House of Commons was rather quiet as the shadow chancellor spoke. There was no obvious organised heckling of McDonnell from the Tory benches. Previously George Osborne’s Treasury Support Group of dozens of backbenchers would arm themselves with special insults to fling at Labour to wrong-foot the frontbencher responding to an autumn statement or budget.

This afternoon’s session of speeches at the Tory conference might best be described as the ‘Why My Department Exists’ section. The ministers who spoke - Culture Secretary Karen Bradley, Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox - all reeled off statistics about sport, the countryside, exports and so on to show that their portfolios really matter. Every year, we hear about the countries whose national products we are selling back to them, and how many trees ministers are planting (not personally, sadly). But this year, we had a new job description: that of the Secretary of State for International Trade. And as well as offering ripostes to jokes cracked by Nick Clegg several weeks ago, Liam Fox did need to explain what he was doing.

We had heard a great deal of Theresa May’s Brexit speech to the Conservative party conference before - to the word, in fact, with the Prime Minister using the same scripted soundbites that she’s deployed as a shield against having to answer questions about Brexit directly. ‘We will not be able to give a running commentary or a blow-by-blow account of the negotiations,’ she told the hall, warning that ‘history is littered with negotiations that failed when the interlocutors predicted the outcome in detail and in advance’. It was difficult not to think of the most recent negotiation where this has happened: David Cameron’s attempt to change Britain’s relationship with Brussels and keep the country in the EU.

What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness as she goes into conference season? The Prime Minister had such a good start to the job that it’s easy to forget that she has the same problems that David Cameron did in terms of parliamentary arithmetic and fractures in her party over Europe. For Cameron, the parliamentary arithmetic was most difficult because there was a hardened core of eurosceptics who distrusted him, and because he and George Osborne had a habit of trying to sneak half-baked policies such as huge cuts to tax credits past MPs and hope that they wouldn’t notice (which they nearly didn’t).

What does Theresa May believe? The new Prime Minister has had the summer to settle into her job and has a chance next week to tell us more about her plans for government. Had she come to power after a general election, or even a proper leadership race, we’d know more about her. Instead, she has the Tory party conference to introduce voters to their new government. We know already that her focus is on those who are ‘just managing’, a phrase that trips off the tongue far more lightly than ‘the squeezed middle’ (Ed Miliband) or ‘alarm-clock Britain’ (Nick Clegg).

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech to Labour conference was rather good. It was clear, it was reasonably neatly-delivered, and it covered all the bases that the Labour leader needed to cover in order to solidify his position following his re-election. Of course, to a certain extent, it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d given the worst speech in the history of Labour conference speeches, given he has performed terribly in Parliament over the past year yet has been returned with a bigger mandate than before. But this was a much better speech than his rambling ‘strong message here’ address to conference last year. This year, Corbyn wanted to set out two messages: I’m still here, so my critics need to shut up, and I think I can win an election in my own left-wing way.

Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech includes the normally unremarkable but currently remarkable assertion that he wants Labour to win the next election. Given the debate that has raged within the Labour party over the past few months about purity vs power, that the re-elected Labour leader is saying this at all is significant. He will say tomorrow that he expects a general election next year and that ‘we expect all our members to support that effort, and we will be ready whenever it comes’. Some Labour MPs will point out that this will require a dramatic shift from some members who haven’t yet delivered any party leaflets but are still threatening to de-select them.

Whether or not to serve on Labour’s frontbench is a question of the same order of asking whether the deck chairs on the Titanic should face north or south. But Labour MPs do have to work out what’s best to do while their ship is being captained by Jeremy Corbyn - and we’re starting to see signs of splits within the moderate camp on how best to do this. This evening, centrist MP Johnny Reynolds is reported to be returning to the Labour frontbench as City Minister, which may mean Labour actually holds meetings with people in the City as opposed to ignoring them. But it is also a completely different approach to that being mooted by a number of his like-minded colleagues.