What are the Conservatives putting the most effort into: winning the next election, or life after defeat? While Rishi Sunak and some of his top team, including the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, still sincerely believe that there is a good chance that they could win the election, other Conservatives have switched their focus to what happens afterwards. That’s why Liz Truss has been on the fringe, why senior cabinet ministers have been making comments that they know will be viewed as a tilt at a future leadership contest, and why this does not feel like a pre-election party conference.

Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the hall yesterday received the first sincerely warm round of applause that I’ve seen at this conference. She took great care to praise Rishi Sunak, but she also had a personal passage about Britain being the best place in the world to be a black person. Supporters of Badenoch had expected something interesting in her speech, and while she wasn’t undermining the current Prime Minister, she was also setting out her brand of Conservatism in a manner that will do her no harm when there is a contest.

Truss’s presence at the conference has been a source of great delight for Labour

Truss, meanwhile, has been delighting in the amount of attention and approval she has received from activists as the last leader they actually elected. Her mission is to push the debate about the future of the party in a certain direction, and with 60 MPs signed up to her Growth Group, she can say that she’s succeeding in that. She might claim victory if any of her ideas make it into a general election manifesto, but it is more likely that the Trussites will be encouraging MPs to say that their party lost because their policies were ignored by the current leadership.

Truss’s presence at the conference has been a source of great delight for Labour, who have been going to strenuous efforts to keep her memory fresh in voters’ minds. No opposition attack strategy can match the power of Truss herself being asked to sign copies of her mini-Budget at the conference.

But then again, even those who are actually focused on winning the next election, rather than what comes after it, are making some odd choices. Rishi Sunak has spent most of this conference refusing to clarify what he’s up to on HS2, rather than talking about the things he would presumably rather voters noticed. He and his ministers have also embarked on a rather weird tour of made-up Labour policies, including Claire Coutinho’s excruciating interview yesterday about whether the Opposition had really advocated a ‘meat tax’. Their other announcements have been small and odd, including a ban on mobile phones during the entire school day which many headteachers are already enforcing.

The comfort Sunak can take is that this isn’t a febrile conference, despite the rows over HS2. This is in part because Tory MPs have already done their panicking about the next election result, and many of them are already well advanced into exit planning for a life outside parliament should they lose their seats. But it explains the lack of energy around an election that is really only around the corner.