They were queuing up in their hundreds – but not for Theresa’s bash

Imagine being Theresa May at half past 12 yesterday afternoon. Walking, with your party chairman, through the venue of your party conference – when you happen upon a swarm of photographers. But they aren’t here to see you. And nor, not far from the swarm, are the hundreds upon hundreds of your party members, who are currently standing in the most enormous, snaking queue.

The queue isn’t for the main hall, where your ministers are giving speeches to promote your policies. The main hall is practically empty. Your members aren’t interested.

Instead, your members are queuing – for over two hours – to hear one of your former ministers trash your leadership, your approach to Brexit, and no doubt any number of your other failings. And you know, with all too brutal certainty, that your members are going to cheer every word.

Imagine being her, at that moment. At her own conference. It must have felt as if all her friends had dropped out of her birthday party (“terribly sorry, old girl, think I’m coming down with something”) – only for her to discover that, in reality, they’re all going to another party, thrown at the last minute by a more popular colleague. Who hasn’t invited her.

Throwing the rival party, in this case, was Boris Johnson, who quit as foreign secretary in July, and he took the opportunity to tell the conference, at considerable length, why. His speech had two parts: first, a list of the glorious goals the Government could be pursuing (if, say, it happened to change leader); and second, a thundering cannonade of condemnation for Mrs May’s Brexit plan.

Here is just a brief selection, a mere taster, of his criticisms. Mrs May’s plan, he blared, was “humiliating”, “a cheat”, “an outrage”, “dangerous”, “unstable”, “a manifest democratic injustice” and “a recipe for continued acrimony” – which would end with the UK “paraded in manacles down the Rue de la Loi like Caractacus”. He even said Mrs May risked “prosecution under the 14th-century statute of praemunire, which says no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country!”

That’s right. A former minister, saying his own party leader could be prosecuted. And what’s more: members of the party cheered, and shouted, “Hear, hear!”

In fact, they cheered most of it. Their cheering seemed to have a strange edge: part desperation and part relief, relief that, at last, a senior Tory was telling them what they wanted to hear.

The ending, though, felt like an anticlimax. After all that, Mr Johnson did not call on Mrs May to go. Instead, he simply said ministers must persuade her to change her mind. He didn’t reveal what he would do if she didn’t.

“I want to congratulate my friend the Chancellor,” Mr Johnson had deadpanned at the start, “for predicting I would never be prime minister. The first Treasury forecast in a long time to have a distinct ring of truth.” We’ll see.