Isabel Hardman

The last day of Labour conference can be a bit of a graveyard slot, given the leader’s speech has already happened. Not so this morning, which contained the two public services that the the party is keenest to talk about: education and the NHS. The NHS has long been a comfort blanket for the party that founded it but often lacks the volition to reform it. Anyone hoping for a cosy, snuggly we-love-the-NHS speech today will have been jolted awake by Wes Streeting, who built on his theme that the health service is ‘no longer the envy of the world’ and is in an ‘existential’ crisis.

The phrase you overhear the most at Labour conference is: ‘this is a good one to come to’. Most delegates assume this is the last conference before a general election, and both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made comments to that effect in their speeches. The latter said she hoped to be standing before the next conference as the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer. When Labour MPs want to be loyal, they really, really go for it It has been a very long time since the party has realistically had these expectations: the pre-election conference in 2014, for instance, was so markedly muted and depressed that it became very clear to those attending that Labour’s frontbenchers did not think they were on the brink of an election win.

Rishi Sunak pitched himself as the change candidate at the next election in his speech to Conservative party conference this afternoon. It was a bold move after 13 years, to argue that ‘if this country is to change, it can only be us who do it’, and to complain that ‘politics doesn’t work the way it should’. He didn’t go so far as to repudiate his predecessors: in fact, he said he didn’t want to ‘waste time’ going over the past and the ‘difficult circumstances’ in which he came into office. But he did refer to a ‘30-year status quo I am here to end’ – at that point in the speech it was in connection to Keir Starmer as the ‘walking definition’ of that status quo, but the past 13 years of status quo have been Tory, not Labour.

'What I have to say to you today is not for the faint-hearted,' Penny Mordaunt said as she opened the final session of the Conservative conference. She didn't have a sword as a prop, but the leader of the House of Commons spent much of her address calling on activists to 'stand up and fight' in the face of the polling, the 'sneering' from the commentators and the Labour party. The theme of the speech was standing up to bullies, taking in her own personal experience of watching the Falklands Taskforce leaving Portsmouth, and Britain's identity in fighting the Nazis and being part of ending the Cold War. The tone of it was classic Mordaunt: well-delivered, funny and easily written-up as a leadership pitch.

What are the Conservatives putting the most effort into: winning the next election, or life after defeat? While Rishi Sunak and some of his top team, including the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, still sincerely believe that there is a good chance that they could win the election, other Conservatives have switched their focus to what happens afterwards. That’s why Liz Truss has been on the fringe, why senior cabinet ministers have been making comments that they know will be viewed as a tilt at a future leadership contest, and why this does not feel like a pre-election party conference. Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the hall yesterday received the first sincerely warm round of applause that I’ve seen at this conference.

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to offer any detail on what he plans to do with HS2, suggesting in a round of broadcast interviews this lunchtime that he hasn’t yet made the final decision. He told Sky that: ‘I think it’s right that I'm not going to get forced into making premature decisions. Not on something that’s so important that costs this country tens of billions of pounds.’ Instead, he told the BBC, he would ‘approach this the same way I approach everything: thoughtfully, carefully, across the detail and making what I believe is the right decision in the long term for our country.