Peter Hoskin

After Gove, a minister whose agenda has gone less smoothly — and it showed. Andrew Lansley's speech to Tory conference was part re-re-restatement of the case for reform, part massage for any residual tensions left over from the summer. Here's a five-point summary of the things that stood out to me: i) An appeal to NHS workers. Lansley began not just by paying extended tribute to NHS staff, but by encouraging everyone else to do the same. "I want to thank them," he said, "and I know we all want to thank them" — to which the audience duly responded with applause. Although this was designed to sweeten some of the less romantic rhetoric later on, it was still telling that Lansley should be quite so effusive at the start.

The list of things that will be Big Politics when Parliament returns from its summer break is growing all the time: growth, the post-riot clean-up, the undeserving rich, multiple squeezes, and so on. But few will have has much everyday resonance as another item on the list: rising energy prices. This has been a problem for some time, of course, thanks to a toxic combination of trickle-down green measures, oil price spikes, and financial effrontery from the energy companies. But it looks only to get worse. This morning's Telegraph reports on an internal Downing Street document — entitled "Impact of our energy and climate policies on consumer energy bills" — which suggests that the coalition's policies will add £300 a year to Joe Public's bills by 2020.

Almost exactly a year ago, Tony Blair's memoirs wafted into bookshops to cause a stir ahead of conference season. Now it it seems that Alistair Darling's, due out next Wednesday, will do exactly the same. Judging by the extracts published over at Labour Uncut, the quiet man of the last Labour government will splash his simmering frustrations and enmities right across the page. Gordon Brown, he will say, became increasingly "brutal and volcanic". Mervyn King was "amazingly stubborn and exasperating". And Ed Balls and Shriti Vadhera will be accused of "running what amounted to a shadow treasury operation within government".

Really, I expected a tidal rush of new opinion polls on the death penalty after Guido launched his campaign for its restoration last week — but, strangely, that hasn't happened yet. There is one poll today, though, by Survation for the Mail on Sunday. It suggests that 53 per cent of people support the death penalty being reintroduced for "certain crimes", against 34 per cent who don't. So far as the supplementary findings go, the death penalty is more popular among older people and among Tory and UKIP voters. Almost half of all respondents believe that serious crimes would decline were the penalty reintroduced. And the three crimes deemed most deserving of the rope (or alternatives) are: mass murder, murder of a child, and serious terrorism offences.