The country is in crisis but the Tories are delighted – they know they have all the time in the world

To put it bluntly, with the polls puzzlingly stable, nothing really matters at the Conservative Party conference, writes Marie Le Conte

Boris Johnson is not as popular as he once was, but he is currently unassailable (AFP/Getty)

Writing a column on Westminster isn’t entirely unlike meeting a friend for a catch-up, in that you ideally need at least one thing to have gone wrong in the recent past to really make it worth it. No one wants to turn up in a bar and announce that absolutely nothing has happened to them since the last meeting, and I cannot exactly come in here and say that there is nothing for me to talk about.

Which is why I spent a large part of Sunday chatting to people at the Conservative Party conference and hoping that they would be unhappy about something. The country is not doing tremendously well after all, and I thought I could pick up various bits of grumbling from the bars of Manchester.

I will be honest with you: it did not go very well. Every Tory I spoke to was, at worst, a bit knackered from the trip up or hungover from the night before. There were some minor gripes but none of them feel worth repeating here. I spoke to another journalist who had similarly been trying to get MPs to be grumpy about tax rises – but failed.