Robert Jenrick walked on with a black metal box, rather like a professional conjuror.

After stern words about the ‘anti-British’ attorney general Lord Hermer, Mr Jenrick turned to the audience and said, ‘now you might be wondering what I have in this box’. My suspicion was that it could be a white rabbit, or a bikini-clad lovely whom Bobby J could saw in half.

A Channel 4 man beside me thought it might be a masonic apron. Close. From his black box Mr Jenrick produced a judge’s wig. This he raised to the audience, an executioner brandishing King Charles’s head. He continued to hold the wig aloft while giving our judiciary a tremendous spanking. He was really quite rude about them. There used to be a convention in public life that one should not call beaks berks. Mr Jenrick ignored it.

There were, he said, ‘dozens of judges with ties to open-borders charities, who take to social media to broadcast their views, who’ve spent their career fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country. Some continue to do so while, astonishingly, serving as judges.’

All this was said while he held that wig. One almost expected it to bite him back, like Rod Hull’s hand-puppet Emu. Despite demotic insults about criminals (‘scumbags’, ‘freeloaders’, ‘morons’), the second part of Mr Jenrick’s speech was up-beat.

He quoted Keats – ‘let me not see our country’s honour fade’ – and listed favourite things about Britain: big skies in Nottinghamshire, ‘blue-remembered hills seen from Black Country towns’, Chris Woakes batting with his arm in a sling, a Greggs pie shop at Peterborough North motorway services. The audience liked him. A lot.

Otherwise, a patchy day for oratory. Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott did not scintillate. Blinding teeth and a white trouser suit. Advert for a smile clinic. Fidgety Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, had the tricky first slot of the day. If you needed someone to ape Basil Fawlty’s goose-stepping routine, long-legged Chris Philp would be your man. He is so energetic that he forgets to breathe properly and becomes v. gulpy. It is exhausting simply to watch.

Aged 23, he had set up a courier firm. ‘I literally know how to deliver!’ Silence. The smallish crowd was just thinking, ‘that perpetual frown: did he bolt his breakfast sausages?’

The speech contained much about bad migrants. We have not been under-truncheoned on the subject. I spotted one gent in a Panama hat and another in red corduroys. Rare specimens. This conference has not, despite certain reports, been short of spotty Tory youths in cheap suits.

The endangered species is the ageing shires Tory, the sort that inhabits Annie Tempest cartoons and smells faintly of sherry and shoe leather. I saw a couple at the Lib Dems’ conference, none at Reform or Labour. Have most of them simply given up on politics until it all becomes less shouty?

A session on trans-rights was unexpectedly more congenial. It featured the Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies – whose Rapunzel locks have gone quite white, presumably from all that chlorine – and a deep-voiced Scot, Marion Calder. Both have been prominent in opposing trans-athletes’ invasion of women’s sport.

A libertarian in the front row tried to give them gyp. Sister Calder was in no mood for nonsense.

‘I will not allow one man to drown out women,’ she growled. The libertarian, scrofulously ill-shaven and wearing a trans-rights T-shirt, departed looking cheesed-off. Ms Calder’s firm no-nonsense manner was preferable to all this belligerence we have had during the autumn conferences. Our political class could usefully rediscover the art of the amusing rebuff.

Talking of which, Kemi Badenoch, on radio, compared Nigel Farage to (loud coughing) Jeremy Thorpe. She meant 1970s Liberal leader Thorpe was once a flyaway political sensation, but then failed.

Being Kemi – she has an engineer’s earnestness – she did not seem to realise everything else that J Thorpe entailed. An accidental joke from Mrs Badenoch.

She makes her big speech today. Bring your tickling sticks.