Theresa May admitted it 'makes no sense' to do what she's insisted on for the past decade – does that really deserve praise?

Of few meaningful announcements, the prime minister promised to allow councils to borrow money to build houses, which councils have been demanding – and the Tories have opposed – for decades

The prime minister should be relieved, everyone agrees, as she had a good conference. Hardly anyone went, which was a huge success, and the conference managers used their influence to prevent any delegates from screaming: “This is what I think of Michel Barnier!” and doing a dump on the podium, to a standing ovation, just in time for it to be on the six o’clock news, with Iain Duncan-Smith beaming he’d scooped it into a jam jar as a souvenir.

So the empty rooms must have thrilled the Conservative leaders, as the average Conservative member is now 107, and if they were asked by John Snow from Channel 4 News for their opinion on tax rates, they would say: “You’re not my sister. Which room is it for Stanley Baldwin?”

There are younger members, but most of them have written blogs saying no one should be allowed to use a foodbank unless they’re prepared to be a human firework for the amusement of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s children, so the ideal conference would be a huge empty hall with three or four carefully vetted kittens playing with bubble wrap.

Some people were allowed to make a speech, which is how Jeremy Hunt announced the EU’s behaviour was the same as the Soviet Union, when faced with a nation that wanted to leave it. This shows how skilful this government is, because when you’re in the middle of a delicate life-changing negotiation, it’s always best to keep things amicable by insisting the other side is as bad as a mass-murdering dictatorship.

I can just imagine that when Hunt bought his house, at the point when he and the vendor were coming to a final price, Hunt said: “You’re like Fred West, you are. I don’t want this house anyway, it’s probably full of corpses. Anyway, nice to chat, we’ll carry on in the morning.”

Hunt proved his understanding of history, because he didn’t choose any random dictator, he selected one that murdered people from countries that are in the EU. For example, when the Soviet Union was uneasy about the attitude of Lithuanians towards the Soviet regime, they did something very similar to the way the EU behaved recently at the Salzburg conference: they deported between 5 and 10 per cent of the population to labour camps.

In the circumstances, this means Hunt has been remarkably restrained as foreign secretary, given that four million British people have been arrested without trial and dumped in a gulag by Jean-Claude Juncker. Maybe Hunt thinks it will help towards achieving his targets for net migration.

The government seems even more delighted with the speech made by the prime minister herself, as she said absolutely nothing of any note that a single person anywhere in the world will take any notice of, but got through it without the ceiling collapsing, or someone shouting: “Sorry, we’re supposed to be in here, the room must have been double-booked”, before sadomasochists bundled someone in a gimp outfit into a cement mixer, right next to her on the stage, while she carried on boasting about the underlying inflation rate.

But something might have slipped by without us realising. She announced proudly “an end to austerity,” then paused for applause. And she was right to expect acclaim for saying she would bring an end to a dreadful practice that only happened because she and her colleagues started it in the first place.

If an arsonist declared: “I can announce I will shortly, when the time is right, stop randomly burning down garden sheds”, we’d all agree that whatever else you might say about Petrol-can Dave, he’s a top bloke for promising to stop doing the thing there was no reason for him to start.

Then she said she would allow councils to borrow money to build houses, just as many councils have been demanding to be allowed to do for 30 years, which the Conservatives have always opposed.

“It makes no sense,” she said, to stop councils doing this, and I expect the full original speech went on “it makes no sense to keep doing the thing we’ve insisted we must do for the last 30 years, while everyone in housing has been screaming at us to stop because it makes no sense, and we’ve told them to piss off and stop being losers because proper people manage to buy their own house”, but the extra bit was cut to save time.

The only new ideas they announced, such as taxes on foreign businessmen buying properties, and ensuring staff in restaurants receive their tips, are taken from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. So this must be the plan: Theresa May is going to outdo Corbyn. In a couple of weeks she’ll tell us: “It makes no sense to sing the national anthem at the Remembrance Day parade”, and go there in cycling shorts in the colours of the Palestinian flag, and sing “I’m the Real Slim Shady” instead.

She might as well, because it’s possible the reason she can’t propose anything, or inspire anyone even on her own side, is she has no idea what she wants or why she wants to cling on, except for its own sake, out of an addiction to clinging.

So she and her colleagues say something one day, then the opposite thing the next day, and when May is asked if she’d like tea or coffee, she probably says: “I want what’s good for Britain. And let me be very, very clear – the circumference of a wasp in the garden will or won’t, we’ll have to see,” then checks on Facebook to see if she’s still prime minister, and congratulates herself on getting through another day.