Conservative conference: David Cameron’s bid for the moral high ground

When he saw colleagues in the tearoom on Friday as the Commons debated air strikes against Isis in Iraq, David Cameron told them that he’d actually been rather nervous about Ed Miliband’s Labour conference speech. The Labour leader has delivered two fantastic ones that set the agenda for the past two autumns, the Prime Minister acknowledged to the MPs he was talking to. But this year, he was pretty relieved as the speech Miliband ended up delivering was a mess.

If general elections are won on conference speeches, then David Cameron has just romped to victory. Things are of course much more complicated than that, and that Conservative party may well leave power next year in spite of seeming more united, more purposeful and more optimistic about government than the opposition.