Isabel Hardman

We may have just witnessed the first outbreak of genuine interest from the Conservative conference floor. Michael Gove was speaking to the not-full room, and bookended his speech with praise for the history of the Tory party. He started by telling the hall that ‘As we know all too well from our history, if you want a mess cleared up you need a Conservative Government‘, and turned again at the end to listing Conservative achievements:  ‘Some people might say that we are setting our sights too high. To them I say, you don’t know our party.

The Tory conference hall is, so far, struggling to replicate the size and excitement of Labour's gathering last week. This isn't entirely the party's fault: the venue itself might be great for listening to an orchestra, but it tends to dampen what atmosphere there is. But the decline in audience enthusiasm has been taking place over a number of years across a number of venues. The reasons for this are manifold. One is that the Tories simply do not have the grassroots membership that Labour does. Another is the way Conservatives struggle to give rousing speeches about what drives them in the way that Labourites do.

As you'd expect on the eve of Tory conference, everyone in the party is offering plenty of advice for Theresa May. Some are tugging the Prime Minister leftwards, while others are fretting that the Conservatives risk abandoning their values. There's Jacob Rees-Mogg arguing that the Tories need to support the institution of the family, Sam Gyimah worrying that the party has 'lost our way' and is both 'talking business down' and 'ignoring the concerns of voters', Boris Johnson complaining about, well, quite a lot, and Liz Truss saying Labour's latest PPB 'does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party'. And it's not even the real eve of party conference. We've got tomorrow and Sunday's papers to go yet.The debate isn't just about what Theresa May is doing, though.

Labour's lost centrists weren't just physically absent at the party's conference: they were also absent from the debate. Perhaps those who had turned up from the 'moderate' wing of the party had expected frequent denunciations of 'Blairites' from the main stage, but it didn't come. In fact, even in the fringes, the moderates came up far less as enemies than the unions and Momentum. This is partly because the Labour Party now feels very comfortable in its Corbynite skin and is more interested in ensuring it can deselect those moderates in the most efficient way rather than attacking them. But the moderates themselves are also quiet because they are on what is probably best described as a psychological precipice.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to Labour conference showed how confident the Labour leader is now. He knew his way around the text enough to be able to make little spontaneous jokes, rather than reading the 'strong message here' instruction from the autocue, as he did in his 2015 address. He varied his pitch, his pace and his tone. None of these things have been guaranteed with Corbyn until now. The speech itself was well-written and structured, starting with a lengthy but effective values-based section where Corbyn praised the membership and attacked the press, which warmed up those in the hall no end. Not that the members needed warming up. They were, unsurprisingly, delighted by the very appearance of their leader, waving 'Jeremy Corbyn' scarves and signing that now famous song.

The Labour leadership may be rowing back from the idea of having a second, female, deputy leader, but that isn’t stopping those who, like Emily Thornberry, fancy a shot at the top job one day. While the Shadow Foreign Secretary was totally loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when she spoke at a Times fringe this lunchtime, she started by talking movingly about her backstory, touching also on the need for a leader who has experience of the frontbench, and repeatedly referred to the importance of members in the Labour Party. It is well-understood that Thornberry would, one day, like to run for leader, and today’s performance not only underlined that, but also showed why she should.

Jeremy Corbyn could be subject to a trigger ballot designed for the deselection of MPs, under plans discussed tonight by members of one of his most supportive party groups. The Labour Representation Committee, from which both Corbyn and John McDonnell hail, met this evening to discuss how to get its way when it comes to party democracy. Save for when McDonnell popped in to thank the LRC for continuing to organise when it looked as though the Left would never win a foothold in the party, the mood was one of frustration. Members were largely cheerful yet also irritated that plans for ‘open selections’ - more commonly known as mandatory re-selection - hadn’t made it into the party’s rule book this week.

A lot of Labour’s energy at the moment seems to be spent on internal battles over which faction wins power on which committee, and whether it should be easier to deselect sitting MPs. A measure of whether its conference is a success is whether it manages to talk about what it wants to do in government. I understand that the leadership’s aim this week is to try to produce an analysis of where society has gone wrong. This sounds rather ‘Broken Britain’, though unsurprisingly the party won’t be using that line. Instead, the tag is ‘rebuilding Britain’, and Jeremy Corbyn and his colleagues will be talking about the impact of eight years of austerity, and post-industrialisation, particularly on parts of the UK that feel left behind.

Theresa May has quite a few challenges to meet this conference season. One is obviously to avoid the sort of farce that her speech descended into last year. Another is to try to unite the warring wings of her party and convince her MPs that Chequers really is the only game in town. But equally as important is the need to show she has things she wants to do when it comes to domestic policy. This is hard: May hasn’t really managed to give that impression at any stage of her premiership, so to start in what feels like the swan song isn’t ideal. Added to that is the general mood in the Conservative Party, which isn’t a million miles away from Labour in 2009/10 at the end of a much longer stint in government.

Following last night's reports of open plotting against Theresa May, her critics in the Conservative party seem rather keen to row back on any suggestion that they really are planning a coup. Iain Duncan Smith, for instance, told BBC Radio 5 Live that he 'would stamp on' any attempted challenge, and that the talk of a plot was 'totally overblown'. Others have pointed out that there were notable senior absences from the European Research Group's meeting last night, including Bernard Jenkin, David Davis, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Of course, even if those big names had been present and plotting merrily away, their plans would have been seriously undermined by the easy leaks that came from the meeting.

Should there be an independent inquiry into the cost of doing nothing in Syria? That's what MPs on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee think in any case, as they publish a report today that looks at the consequences of parliament's decision not to intervene in the conflict in 2013. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt has already told MPs on that committee that an independent inquiry isn't possible, but their report argues that 'the government needs to understand the role the UK's inaction has had and learn the lessons from it for the future'. If a short inquiry and report can achieve this, the committee offers a grim preview of what such an inquiry might find, pointing to the 400,000 deaths and the mass exodus of 11 million Syrian people from their homes.