YESTERDAY’S Conservative Party conference was all about one person: Boris Johnson.

Mr Johnson booked the largest room in the conference centre, with enough space for 700, but people started queuing three hours early. He was flanked by a bigger entourage of security guards and minders than he ever commanded as foreign secretary.

The journalists were as fevered as many of the delegates and began queuing just as early. The tabloids rejoiced in the fact that Mr Johnson appeared to mock Mrs May by jogging through a field of “wheat” near his Oxfordshire home (Ms May once remarked that the naughtiest thing she had done as a child was to run through a wheat field).

Some say that Mr Johnson has talked to “senior Tories” about making a leadership bid and that, if he were to do so, he’d delay Brexit for at least six months in order to restart negotiations. Mr Johnson has apparently laid out nothing less than an alternative manifesto for the future of the Conservative Party. In his speech he denounced Mrs May’s Chequers plan for EU withdrawal as an “outrage” that would leave the UK “locked in the tractor beam of Brussels”. He warned that the only winners from a Chequers-style Brexit would be the far-right and far-left in British politics.

But his “chuck Chequers” line was delivered in an unconvincing manner and the whole speech delivery looked over-choreographed – infact he looked like a politician not yet quite ready to make a bid for the top job, but determined to continue muddying the waters.