Tory conference has long been more stage-managed than other party meetings, but this year the official speeches from ministers have also been condensed into a very strange late afternoon slot lasting just two hours. The rest of the time is free for fringe meetings and plotting.

Ministers and their aides have been told they have to keep their addresses to the hall announcement-lite, which makes those two hours feel largely pointless. Kwasi Kwarteng didn’t announce very much at all, even though his two U-turns have dominated the day’s agenda. This morning, the Chancellor dropped the plan to abolish the 45p rate of tax, and this evening it has emerged that he is also bringing forward his medium-term fiscal plan from 23 November – something ministers had been asked to hold the line on.

A clue to the next potential U-turn came not in one of the speeches but in one of the considerably more-scripted and stage-managed ‘discussions’. These have been going on for years at Conservative conference: a minister or two is relegated from a formal speaking slot to a cosy and allegedly informal sit-down with someone who is often a very nice and slightly nervous small business owner, charity pioneer or environmental campaigner. The chit-chats involve a suspiciously large sheaf of notes: indeed, in this particular ‘discussion’, Work and Pensions Secretary Chloe Smith largely abandoned the pretence that this was spontaneous and held her script up so she could read from it verbatim.

But within that script, Smith had a line that she may well end up using against her ministerial colleagues such as Kwarteng in future. She told the hall that ‘we know that people are struggling with some of the costs that are rising’, adding: ‘That’s why protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me.’ It sounds quite anodyne, but given one of the big battles of the autumn is going to be over whether benefits are raised in line with inflation, it was a clear marker that Smith doesn’t think that trying to get some savings this way is the right thing to do. She’s not a noisy cabinet minister and is much more likely to make her arguments behind closed doors. But she does also have a very helpful backbench campaign led by someone who loves a public fight: Michael Gove.

What is Gove’s endgame? He hasn’t packed up his bags since Kwarteng U-turned on the 45p: instead, he was still touring the fringe this evening. He has made clear that the benefit rise must go ahead, and many of his colleagues have made the same point to Kwarteng themselves. But even if it does, that’s not going to be the former minister’s last battle. Tory MPs are fascinated by where he wants this to end. Is he still hoping that Kemi Badenoch, who he initially backed for leader, could yet take over from Truss? Badenoch had a really good stint on the conference stage in the most lively session of the afternoon programme. She had members eating out of her hand as she talked about taking pride in Britain, about immigration, and about culture wars. Perhaps Gove might want her star to rise further. Or perhaps he is still holding out for Rishi Sunak, who he later backed, and who is staying away from the conference to allow Liz Truss to ‘own the moment’.

I don’t get the sense that a Sunak succession would do anything to stop the civil war in the party, though: there is a lot of bad feeling among MPs about the way some parts of his campaign operated. Then again, there’s just a lot of bad feeling and mistrust in the party now. The one thing Truss has managed to unite her party on is that MPs in every faction are now annoyed with her.