So the MPs trudged into the sauna-bunker, pestered by Beth Rigby. “It’s getting nasty isn’t it Mark?” she shouted after Francois, who snorted. Below, a journalist tells me she was eating lobster at the weekend. It’s what everybody in the looks like. The competition for sweatiest man in here is a brutal free-for-all. Anybody could win.

This is, said Steve Baker, “literally the hottest event in Westminster.” Speeches are made. Pledges follow them, like tails. Nadhim Zahawi (13 MPs) is going to get hacking away — he will lower the base rate of income tax to 19p next year and 18p the year after; some VAT will be vaporised; he will reverse the corporation tax hike. He praised Rishi Sunak. When Rishi rolled out furlough the public understood it, because a free lunch is always comprehensible. Now, the new Chancellor said sadly, nobody “understands our plan”. So he will cut taxes, and free lunches will fall from the sky. And under Zahawi there will be freedom. To buy petrol. To buy “chocolate bars”.

Suella Braverman (11 MPs) told the melting candles in the crowd that they shouldn’t vote for her because she’s brown. “Vote for me because I love this country and I’m a conservative”. Freedom is the product of a smaller state, lower taxes, and money in people’s back pockets.

She was a better speaker than Zahawi, but no poet. I think of Churchill’s description of Tory democracy, a society “in which there should be no limit to which any man might rise, but a limit beneath which no man might fall”. Braverman is more interested in Thatcherite cuts than Churchillian limits. So are the rest of them.

The sun was burning in the room. And the sun that burns above the Conservative party, still, is not Churchill or Johnson — it’s Margaret Thatcher. It’s a shame for them they can’t seance her back into Westminster. On this evidence, no one else matches up.