The National Conservatism conference is entering its third day in London, and has managed to grab more headlines than the official Conservative conference usually does. Tory party conferences have become so stage-managed that attendees often don’t bother going into the main hall – except for a quiet breather – because they know they won’t learn anything from the speakers. Last autumn, one of the Tory events included a minister and a guest speaker holding an ‘in conversation’ session that appeared to have been pre-written on a script. No wonder the NatCon event is making waves – and has been so attractive to Tory MPs and ministers, including the Home Secretary Suella Braverman, because it appears to be a genuine conference rather than a stage performance.

The problem for Rishi Sunak is that stage performance is the sort of thing a party trying to stay in government for an historic fifth term after the next general election should be aiming for, not a debate about what Conservatism should be. That kind of debate works well in opposition when a party is recovering from more than a decade of what Michael Gove yesterday described as the ‘boring and even more dispiriting task of government’, but the Tory party hasn’t actually reached opposition yet. It still has time to talk about government, about what the party has achieved in its 13 years, such as education reforms, which most Conservative MPs seem to have forgotten is an achievement of their own party, even as pupils’ reading scores rocket up. It can also talk about what the government is doing now: What is it doing? Does anyone in the Conservative party know? And when are they going to tell us about it?

No wonder figures like Braverman are already preparing for what they expect to be a spell in opposition

It’s easy to blame backbenchers who sound off about the importance of the ‘normative family’ or the dangers of childcare for stealing the airtime that the Conservatives should be using to talk about delivering (Sunak was joking at his garden party for Tory MPs this week that he was delivering both in government and also with food). But the Prime Minister appears to lack authority and presence.

Sunak’s authority was undermined from the very start by his appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary in order to get his second leadership campaign sufficient support from the right of the Conservative party. Braverman showed this week what the power balance between the two of them was when she pitched up at the NatCon conference to give her own vision of immigration under a Conservative government, implying that she didn’t think this one was doing it right yet.

Braverman has also been having a row with cabinet colleagues who pay lip service to driving immigration numbers down, but take a NIMBYish approach to any attempts to cut numbers in their own sectors; yesterday Sunak was praising the extension of the Seasonal Worker scheme just a day after Braverman had talked about the need for Brits to be the ones picking the fruit. Sunak’s habit of detaching himself from problems in government and offering a commentary rather than a great clunking stamp of authority on, say, the resignation of a minister, means he just seems less powerful. No wonder figures like Braverman are already preparing for what they expect to be a spell in opposition and a new leadership contest: the party seems quite content to be detached from power at the moment. Though it will find that opposition is even more boring and dispiriting than governing.