Endearingly game moves from a super trouper as style emerges a clear winner over substance

Well, it was certainly a lot better than last year’s. Admittedly that isn’t a high bar to clear. In fact, the bar is so low you’d have to dig through 60 feet of soil, stones, Roman pottery and brontosaurus fossils to find it.

Last year’s conference speech was a knuckle-gnawing catastrophe: the comedian handing over her P45, the half-hour coughing fit, the letters of her slogan falling one by one from the wall behind her while she croaked obliviously on. My heart thudded. My ribcage tightened. Sweat swam down my back. It hurt to watch.

This year’s speech, however, was unquestionably, incontrovertibly, 100 per cent not a disaster. And, at the start of this horrible week, Theresa May would surely have taken that.

She began the right way: with a run of jokes at her own expense. To the strains of Dancing Queen by Abba, out she came, strutting and jerking, in a send-up of her unforgettable performances in Africa. The hall loved it. There’s something endearing about Mrs May’s dancing. It shows an unfamiliar side of her. Normally, she seems so cold and stern and glowering. But her dancing makes her look somehow vulnerable. The long flapping arms, the spindly stork-like legs. Gawky, but game.

Next came a reference to last year’s calamity. “You’ll have to excuse me if I cough during my speech,” she said. “I’ve been up all night supergluing the backdrop.” And with that, any tension in the audience simply floated away.

You could feel the relief – and the goodwill. Everyone relaxed. Mrs May relaxed, too. She lined up another joke. “I’ve seen the trailers for Bodyguard,” she said. “And let me tell you: it wasn’t like that in my day…”

She delivered the punchline genuinely well. All the way through her speech, in fact, she was confident, assured, in control. It was great. There was only one small problem. She had absolutely nothing to say. Nothing. No big ideas – and precious few small ones. Put it like this. When your big front-page announcement on the morning of your conference speech is a freeze on fuel duty – which has been government policy for the past eight years – you know the cupboard is bare.

Instead, she filled the time with warm words about the NHS, diversity, even Diane Abbott. She put on the soft, low, earnest voice she uses for such topics: the one that makes her sound as if she’s narrating an appeal for the RSPCA. “Remember: just £2 will keep a puppy like Charlie in chew toys for a month.”

Platitudes. That was all she had. But if her audience minded, they didn’t say so. They applauded her warmly. Perhaps because, whatever they think of her approach to Brexit, they respect her resilience. Or perhaps they were just grateful that her cough hadn’t come back.

She may have had nothing to say – but at least she managed to say it.