Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson's speech to Conservative Party conference was disloyal to the Prime Minister in the sense that unlike Theresa May, the Foreign Secretary finds it easy to be upbeat and persuasive about the benefits of Conservatism. As this morning's round of interviews showed, the Prime Minister's definition of ‘upbeat’ is talking faster. Johnson, meanwhile, uses his command of the English language and confidence in public speaking to cheer up party members who were so desperate for something to take their minds off their current general misery that they were queuing in long lines to get into the conference hall. But members already love Johnson.

Where can Conservatives go if they're looking to cheer themselves up at their rather nervous, doleful conference? A fringe with Ruth Davidson seems to be the answer. The Scottish Tory leader gave an interview to the Times in a totally packed room at the Midland Hotel this lunchtime, and it was clear that Tory members were there hoping to hear from a Conservative who is doing well and in good cheer. There's something about Davidson's blunt approach to politics that Tory members seem to like. She tells them they're in a miserable state and need to pull themselves together, and gives the impression that she's already got it together - rather like the sports teacher who shouted at them a lot at school, or the army officer who turned up to take cadets.

Theresa May took just 15 seconds to sack Nicky Morgan as Education Secretary. Morgan’s revenge has taken a little longer. First, she criticised the Prime Minister’s expensive trousers, but once she’d apologised for that, the Loughborough MP then set herself up as something far more troublesome in the long-term than a fashion critic. Not only is she a prominent campaigner against a Hard Brexit, Morgan is also the chair of the Treasury Select Committee, one of the most powerful backbench operations around. When we meet in her Commons office, Morgan is busy planning how to make the government’s life uncomfortable through a series of select committee hearings and through a series of amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill which have landed ministers in a spin.

A few weeks ago, Theresa May seemed surprisingly stable as Tory leader, given the mess of the snap election. Her cabinet had finally stopped squabbling about Brexit and Conservative backbenchers were largely backing her to continue. But on the eve of party conference, things don't look so great. Firstly, the Cabinet unity has disappeared again. The Prime Minister's Florence speech opened up a war of bids for her attention from Brexiteers and Brexitsceptics alike, all of whom believed that the Prime Minister is so malleable on policy that she just needs to hear the same thing over and over again before she believes it.

Jeremy Corbyn was generous to the Shadow Cabinet in his conference speech, especially to Diane Abbott, who had a terrible election campaign personally, suffering from problems with her diabetes and horrendous racist and misogynist abuse. The Labour leader led a standing ovation to the Shadow Home Secretary, followed by a rendition of 'happy birthday'. He told the hall that 'the campaign by the Tories and their loyal media was nasty and personal. It fuelled abuse online and no one was the target of that more than Diane Abbott.' Let's just recall the abuse of Diane Abbott during the election campaign. She said she had been called a 'n***** bitch', sent rape and death threats and received 45 per cent of all abusive tweets sent to female MPs during the election campaign.

Brexit has been an odd sideshow to the Labour conference, with pro-Corbyn factions such as Momentum working hard to keep the topic away from any awkward votes on the floor of the Brighton Centre hall. Perhaps that’s why it took more than an hour for anyone to mention it as a potential issue the party needed to think about at tonight’s Fabian Question Time fringe. By this point, we had run over the same arguments for solving the housing crisis that are wheeled out and then packed away without much progress, tax avoidance, and the Labour Party’s problem with anti-semitism (none of the speakers tried to claim this didn’t exist, by the way).

If you wanted a clue to how much the Labour Party has changed over the past few years, you wouldn't have had to sit through much more than the first few lines of John McDonnell's conference speech. He started it with the words 'I'd like to thank Ken Loach for that wonderful film'. Loach hasn't been the most loyal supporter of the Labour Party over the years, but is now firmly back in the fold thanks to Jeremy Corbyn. Party members, normally tribally opposed to those who set up rival parties, gave the veteran filmmaker a standing ovation. The Labour Party has been changing for a while, but this conference is showing that it is now comfortably settled into its new Corbynite skin.

The Labour Party is starting this conference season in its most confident mood for years - even though it still isn’t in government. It’s not just the confidence of the party’s leader as he makes demands on public spending which would previously have been dismissed, but also what MPs and activists are now calling for as they stand up at fringe meetings. They may not have won an election, but they have started to regain the political narrative, and so they are in a considerably less defensive mood than over the past few years. Take tonight’s Open Labour fringe rally. Open Labour is a ‘soft left’ pressure group in the party, though there was nothing soft about tonight’s event. It kicked off with a passionate speech from newly-elected MP Emma Hardy.

Have you heard the one about the new Labour MP who refuses to be friends with Tories? When Laura Pidcock dropped into an interview with a left-wing website that she has ‘absolutely no intention of being friends with’ any Tories, she was surprised by the fuss that followed. It might have seemed odd to her, but within Parliament it’s well known that friendships that cross the divide spring up the whole time. Sometimes it’s personal: Kezia Dugdale, leader of the Scottish Labour Party, caused headlines when she started dating a nationalist MSP. But more often, political: to achieve something, MPs from different parties often have to work together. But the new member for North West Durham sounds as if she is appalled at the whole system.

This week marks two years since Jeremy Corbyn was announced as the Labour leader. When he took over, he promised to shake up the way Prime Minister’s Questions was done, to make it more about the voters and less about the political point-scoring. But interestingly, he has now settled into a rather effective political routine. Corbyn now runs through a series of policy areas on which the Tories look weak, almost regarding Theresa May’s answers as incidental to the process rather than the prompt for him to probe more and point out that she hasn’t answered the question at all. This is probably a wise move, given Theresa May tries to make her answers as incidental and irrelevant as possible.

The Tories are starting their series of U-turns on the public sector pay cap, but after so much see-sawing over whether they would drop the cap or not, the party will get very little political credit for doing so. It now looks as though ministers are yielding to pressure from Labour and Conservative backbenchers, rather than deciding that the time for pay restraint has come to an end. As I wrote last week, the decision to end the pay freeze is only the latest in a line of concessions to disgruntled MPs following the snap election and the DUP deal. The next political row could well be Northern transport infrastructure.