Banks, business and Boris Johnson at the Conservative conference

So what was Project Merlin about if we, the taxpayers, are on the brink of lending money to small and medium-sized businesses?

Wasn’t that what the banks were meant to do? Wasn’t the Merlin deal that the state would stay its hand on thwacking them with more tax if they would promise to lend money (and temper bonuses)?

Well, bank lending is down every month the figures come out at the moment, a breach of the spirit of the deal – but not the letter. Because the banks insisted that “gross lending”, not “net lending”, should be the measure. They are getting away with it.

Tuesday at Tory Conference is always a tricky one. Mondays are always dominated by the economy, Wednesday belongs to the leader. If there is a theme to today’s pudding, it is that the Tories want you to know they’re not just about cutting – they plant metaphorical trees too.

They want voters to associate them with, as they see it, policies they are busy with, that will affect ordinary people’s lives. So it’s Andrew Lansley on the NHS, Michael Gove on schools and Theresa May on tough stuff in home affairs.

It was a Tuesday two years ago at a Tory conference in Manchester when Boris Johnson brightened up the lives of us journalists, barging into the careful choreography and rampaging around the place for 12 hours with an off-message line on Europe. Today he was back.

Last night in the fringe parties he sounded like a man brewing up for another anti-EU splurge. Some in government thought that he would take a pop at the Treasury for not handing over the cheques he says he needs to get London police numbers up. Instead, he delivered a funny but on-message speech. Journalists visibly sagged. I chased him afterwards to ask about eurozone policy, the Greeks, our government’s position, but he was on best behaviour.

My ITN colleague Lucy Manning asked him if he was interested in the leadership of the party and his reply was “grrrrr,” which is itself, I think, broadly on message.