Kemi Badenoch enjoys proclaiming hard truths. She declares at frequent intervals, her face wreathed in smiles, that we cannot have our cake and eat it.
Boris Johnson, the leading exponent of cakeism in recent times, goes unmentioned by her, but she makes it perfectly clear that his approach is not hers.
For Badenoch, it is a vast relief that she is not obliged to defend the record of the last Conservative Government, indeed is obliged to say that by peddling easy answers it bears a large share of the blame for bringing the country to its present dangerously torpid, over-borrowed condition.
It appears to suit her that she is at present the Conservative Party’s one big star, obliged to act at the start of the annual conference as her own warm-up act, as well as to deliver on Wednesday the grand finale by which the success or failure of the gathering is likely to be judged.
At an hour when nobody should be either making or watching television, 9.00 a.m. on Sunday morning, on switching on the set in my hotel room who should be there but Badenoch, talking to Laura Kuenssberg, albeit in a pre-recorded segment of the programme.
One hard truth followed another. In their exchanges about the Conservative plan to build 50,000 extra prison places, Badenoch informed us that “prison works”, and also that “there is no magic rehabilitation machine”.
When the talk turned to the murder of Ann Widdecombe, and threats made against other MPs including herself, she reminded us that this has happened before: “One of my heroes, Airey Neave, was blown up by the IRA.”
The fatal attack on the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, and erstwhile escaper from Colditz, was committed on 30th March 1979, about nine months before Badenoch was born.
“I’m a classic old-school Conservative,” she avowed a few minutes later, reminded viewers that “personal responsibility is not a 1980s idea”, and announced the publication on the first day of the conference of her slim volume, The Right Way.
It is modelled on The Right Approach, which came out in October 1976, during another period when the party was in opposition and attempting to return to the first principles which would guide it if and when it got back into government.
According to Badenoch, “Labour goes wrong when it follows its principles; we go wrong when we fail to follow ours.”
With ebullient sincerity she set about proclaiming some of those principles. Her performances are so assured because she believes she is saying the right thing.
At two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, a time at which traditionalists would say it still does not feel right to be engaging in politics, the formal conference proceedings opened in the Symphony Hall, the one part of the International Conference Centre in Birmingham which does not provoke, by its tawdry design and construction, a shudder of horror.
The Conservative Party contains a good proportion of traditionalists, which is possibly one reason why the hall was far from full, but those members who had turned up nevertheless made every attempt to applaud the speakers, who were defending the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The singing of the National Anthem, and playing of brief passages from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, aroused pleasantly patriotic emotions.
The victory of the Conservative candidate in the Aberdeen South by-election on 16th June (the same day as Andy Burnham won Makerfield) also provoked pleasure.
But only the arrival on stage of Badenoch provoked long and solid applause. She said the Conservatives had governed for the 18 years from 1979 to 1997 because “we started with the right foundations”, and the task now is to build once more the right foundations, to which endeavour The Right Way will contribute.
It is, she declared, no good treating the symptoms of our nation’s difficulties, as other politicians are inclined to do: “I want to fix the causes.”
And those causes can only be examined while the party is in opposition, for once in government “there is always an emergency”.
Badenoch communicated the faith that her approach will lead to victory: her followers believe there is at least a fighting chance she is right.