Not your usual Tory conference

Forty days and 40 nights used to be the rule for time spent in the wilderness but, apparently innumerate, the Tories translated that into 13 years plus a few months.

As we all now know it was Dave who saved them and this week in Birmingham he should be getting his reward, but will he get his comeuppance instead?

Just 12 months ago he and his party had the smell of power firmly up their patrician nostrils; they were 14 per cent ahead in the polls and heading for an historic victory. Gordon was stumbling from one disaster to the next and as for the Cleggster, he didn’t even rate a mention in the loyal address to the troops.

Who would have forecast then that Dave would not win and that Scottish sulk would just lose. That less than six months after the election Labour would be nipping at the Tories’ heels in the opinion polls. That the slogan for the first Conservative conference in Government for 14 years would be “Together in the national interest”, and the elephant in the room would be called Nick.

If all had gone to plan this would have been a victory celebration to match that of Mrs T back in 1979. Instead it will be a more muted affair as the party faithful try to work out how they ended up in bed, as some of the more diehard apparently literally fear, with the Lib Dems.

It will be the secret that dare not speak its name as Dave shrugs off the coalition as much as he can to claim the success is all his. And insofar as he is the occupant of 10 Downing Street it is.

The great thing about the annual conference of the Conservative Party is that it has no power whatsoever. Not for its leaders tedious motions committing them to policies they don’t want or votes they would rather not have, instead usually rapturous applause for speeches pressing the right buttons for the right representatives as they are known.

But this week it could go a bit wrong. For more than a decade they have been able to say what they like, confident in the knowledge that power was but a figment of the imagination. But now they have it, even if shared with the sandal wearers, and that makes a hell of a difference.

There are certainties at the Tory Party conference where leaders in the past have known they could hide when the going gets tough.

The first of these was defence of the realm since the hall always seemed to include anybody who made it beyond lieutenant in the Armed Forces. But thanks to Defence Secretary Liam Fox, what was once certain is no longer so.

Ministry of Defence police are still searching for the mole who leaked the private letter Liam sent to Dave saying defence “looked less and less defensible” following rows with the bully boys at the Treasury.

Everyone knows that Liam and Dave are not best buddies and he only got the defence job to keep the more recidivist wing of the party happy and everyone noted that the leak came in the week before the Conference and everyone heard Liam say he was “furious” that the letter was leaked. But leaked it was and if the mole is found everyone will be very surprised.

So that’s a potential problem with defence, but at least there is the second certainty of any Tory get together Law and Order…well not quite.

To give his incoming Government some bottom, bearing in mind some of his Ministers had still been in school the last time the Tories had power, Dave appointed one of the biggest bottoms of them all Ken Clarke, to be Justice Secretary and Ken thought he meant it.

Hanging, flogging and shooting has always historically been a popular approach towards crime and criminals among large parts of the Party, in fact so popular that Labour, ever eager for any available vote, adopted the language if not the practice themselves.

It will be a more muted affair as the party faithful try to work out how they ended up in bed, with the Lib Dems

Jack Straw set out to build a new prison on every bit of flat land he could find so imagine the shock in Tory circles when Ken announced prison wasn’t working. Michael, now Lord Howard, was so angry he dug himself up to complain.

Ken has always been suspect since being spotted wearing suede shoes and declaring a love for jazz.

It is a tradition at the conference for the senior Minister to introduce his team to the party faithful. On Ken’s team are two parliamentary secretaries of state. Crispin Blunt MP who announced in August he was gay and leaving his wife and Jonathan Djanogly who was revealed to have hired private detectives to investigate his Conservative colleagues’ opinions of him. Their introduction to the conference should stretch Ken’s use of English quite considerably. This bit of theatre starts at 11.30 on Tuesday morning.

The third get out of jail free card at the conference has always been the welfare state which critics say Tories are in favour of until they can afford not to be.

Again Dave had to bite the bullet and install Iain Duncan Smith, so beloved of the party that they voted him out of the leader’s job, as the Work and Pensions Minister. Like the rest IDS was told to come back with plans for big savings. He said he could save billions over the next 10 years, the only problem being he would have to spend a few billion now to do it.

But if you believe that our tears and sick are the only outlook for Dave this week, then you haven’t got the measure of the man and his gang.

The first lesson for any good leader is to get himself out of the immediate firing line. Please meet, if you haven’t already been frightened by him, his best friend and Chancellor George Osborne.

The conference, or certainly that part which still venerates the handbag politics of Mrs T, love a bully and George makes Flashman look mild mannered.

It is George who is in the frame for the defence cuts. It is he who suggests one aircraft carrier might be enough and it is he who says Trident must be paid for out of MoD petty cash.

It is George who took IDS behind the bike sheds with his welfare plans before announcing they had “mutually” agreed the way ahead. And it’s George who is prowling the country checking on widows and orphans to see what they are going to have to cough up in the comprehensive spending review.

It will be George too who will play the biggest card of the week by pledging to cut public sector jobs. The word “bloated” was clearly invented to give Sun and Daily Mail headline writers a code to describe those who empty the bins. As they would say, we want more collections and fewer collectors, more tax revenue and less taxmen and more of us and less of them. If that doesn’t bring down the hall he needs to check his satnav.

George is being let out for an hour just before lunch to maul the country and cheer the conference, but Dave was up and about yesterday making it clear he had him under control.

Duck and dive, bob and weave…

George had mentioned cuts of up to 40 per cent, but Dave downgraded that to 5 per cent yesterday; agreed it would be 5 per cent a year, but it makes a far better headline.

And that’s what Dave sees his job as; making the government more palatable. Labour activists are already over excited at the belief that Dave is daft enough to let George lay about the country with a big stick. He’s already taken the NHS and education off the battlefield and he will do whatever is necessary to keep defence on side.

The axe will fall but mostly in those areas where the Tories have little hope of votes and if the Lib Dems squeal they have nowhere to go and Nick has no plans to go anywhere apart from the office of deputy PM.

Dave didn’t win the election but he won the job he wanted and thanks to the Lib Dems managed to emasculate the nuttier wing of his party and its policies.

The coalition remains popular, the Tory Party likes Nick and Dave tops all the polls as the man best able to run the country.

All he has to do on Wednesday is stand up and he’ll get applause. If he speaks he’ll get even more. As Dave knows, the key is to say everything and say nothing. As a friend used to say, “duck and dive, bob and weave…”

Peter McHugh is the former director of programmes at GMTV and was this year awarded the Royal Television Society Lifetime Achievement Award.