The Tory conference tried desperately to pretend the party wasn’t consumed by Brexit

When the PM improbably declared that Tories ‘love Europe’, they seemed bemused – as if they suspected they were being tricked into something they feared they’d soon regret

MPs cheered lustily when Johnson vowed to ‘get Brexit done’ in his conference speech (PA)

Boris Johnson wanted two big messages to come out of the Conservative conference. First, that the Tories will sort Brexit out, and second that once it’s out of the way, they are just itching to focus all their attention on spending money on public services.

It was there in the weird portmanteau slogan plastered on every surface in Manchester: Get Brexit done: invest in our NHS, schools and police.

And it was there in speech after speech, as ministers treated the biggest and most disruptive constitutional change for generations as a pesky chore that needed to be done before they could get down to the real work of government.

But that’s not the story you heard chatting with activists in the tea-rooms and bars.

There, the talk was all of getting out of Europe, shaking off the chains of Brussels dictatorship, crushing the “treacherous” MPs and lawyers who were getting in the way of the purity of the wishes of the 17.4 million.

They cheered lustily when Johnson promised in his leader’s speech not to be deflected from the goal of a Halloween Brexit.

But when he turned to his passion to put more money into youth clubs and FE colleges and invest in bus services for the “left behind” towns of the Midlands and the north, their eyes rather glazed over and the applause dried up.

And when the PM improbably declared that Tories “love Europe”, they seemed bemused, clapping half-heartedly as if they suspected they were being tricked into something they feared they’d soon regret.

Instead of a party limbering up for an election, with lots of big ideas about what they want to do for the country, the Tories appeared fixated on the single issue of Europe, of attaining a goal they have held for so long that they have almost forgotten why it had seemed such a good idea in the first place.

Again and again, the mantra was repeated that we had to “get Brexit done”, “get it over the line”, “get it over”, without anyone apparently asking themselves the simple question – which Dominic Cummings apparently repeats constantly in cabinet meetings – “why?”

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor