QUENTIN LETTS: Kuenssberg stiffened like a porcupine… Mrs B enjoys winding up the Beeboids

Here in the pit lane, Tory mechanics are peering at the blackened wreckage of their party. The gleaming roadster is now a smoking wreck. Can anything be saved or is its cylinder block cracked?

As at the scene of any big-end explosion, some are fatalistic, others make wisecracks. Dan Hannan, former MEP and now a peer, walked on stage and started reciting Rudyard Kipling: ‘This is the midnight, let no star delude us, dawn is very far. This is the tempest long foretold.’ Lord Gloomy Guts! 

Hannan, in such a mood, is not unlike one of those keening crones in a J M Synge play. You half-expected him to start sucking the paw of a dead rabbit and pronounce curses on all descendants of Lugh of the Long Arm.

Yet his lordship did note that the election result was personal rather than philosophical. There had not been any ‘massive shift in cultural values in the nation’. Voters just hated the Tories. Maybe they’ll soon hate Labour.

Ex-MP Penny Mordaunt is here. Looking nicely tragic round the eyelines she did a morning telly turn and made a platform speech.

Tory leadership frontrunner Kemi Badenoch arriving in Birmingham on Saturday evening for the party conference

James Cleverly and his wife Susannah at the Conservative annual conference on Sunday

Leadership contest contender Robert Jenrick at the Tory party conference in Birmingham

Former MP and cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt said that Sir Keir Starmer had brought ‘a touch of the Imelda Marcoses to the office of Prime Minister’

Members applauded party chairman Richard Fuller when he denounced MPs for in-fighting

She said Sir Keir Starmer had brought ‘a touch of the Imelda Marcoses to the office of Prime Minister’.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg almost swallowed her pencil. ‘Did you just compare him to Imelda Marcos?’

‘I did,’ said husky Penny with an eyebrow and a half.

The moment she stepped on stage, representatives cheered. They like Penny, despite her weakness for wokery.

She reeled off a list of events this summer – everything from Rotarian fund-raising to Team GB at the Olympics, Alan Bates’s knighthood to the Princess of Wales speaking up for cancer sufferers, and said: ‘It might be that our party is in the doldrums but its values are vibrantly alive.’ 

Alongside her in the TV studio, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch did look terribly young.

In the conference foyer you are confronted by vast banners of the four candidates for the leadership. The one of Mr Jenrick has slightly Star Trek ears. James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat have both gone for the open-necked look.

Mrs Badenoch may be the one to beat. She gave Comrade Kuenssberg a second attack of the vapours by saying our culture is a damn sight better than certain others. 

And immigrants should drop the anti-Israel stuff. Laura K stiffened like a porcupine. Mrs Badenoch enjoys winding up Beeboids.Later one of Mr Jenrick’s flunkeys toured the press compound, stirring trouble for Mrs Badenoch, calling her ‘Kemi-kaze’ for suggesting that maternity leave was becoming onerous for employers.

That sort of negative dumping would have annoyed the representatives in the hall. 

They applauded party chairman Richard Fuller when he denounced MPs for in-fighting.

Mr Fuller did some magnificent grovelling to the activists for the election defeat. Real Japanese salaryman carpet-munching. The members enjoyed that.

Rishi Sunak is here somewhere. He was photographed on arrival, cardigan casual. Then he vanished behind closed doors, reporters not admitted. There are more people here than I expected and they are actually going to be allowed to contribute to debates.

Since Cameroon days that sort of thing has been v. much discouraged. It could go horribly wrong. The ones I have seen so far are back to the Tories of old, heroically unfashionable in shiny suits, comb­overs and bold tummies.

Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat at a hustings on the first day of the annual party conference

In the conference foyer you are confronted by vast banners of the four candidates for the leadership

Figures of former Conservative leaders and prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Sir Winston Churchill at the party conference 

First time I can remember since going to a church in Blackpool with John Smith in the late 1980s, there was a conference church service. 

Birmingham Cathedral was packed. The vergers must have needed a Methuselah of the (goodish, quite golden) communion wine, such was the turnout.

The liturgy was a little plastic – we had to do the sign of peace, eek – and the bishop kept mentioning climate change, but the first lesson was from Numbers: ‘The rabble among the people had a strong craving.’

That craving in July was for change but not, perhaps, for socialism. There lies the Tories’ glimmer of hope.