“I had a really good media round,” Kemi Badenoch announced on Sunday afternoon, which is certainly one way of looking at a day that ended with her rejecting the position she’d appeared to be taking in the morning.

The Conservative conference in Birmingham has a surprisingly optimistic tone. The party is still very much in the denial phase of grief, a perspective only encouraged by the government’s recent troubles. Any day now, the public are going to see the error of their ways and begin begging the Tories to come back to them.

And when they do, the party will be ready, under whichever dynamic leader they pick from the incredibly strong field they’re being offered. I find that at any given moment, I can only name three of the candidates, though which one I’ve forgotten changes day by day.

There was little danger, on Sunday, of forgetting Badenoch. If you wanted to know what the rows were about, you could, helpfully get the whole affair from her Twitter feed. One of Badenoch’s endearing qualities is her habit of posting videos of her saying things in order to prove that she didn’t say them.

So here we could see her seeming to tell Times Radio that maternity pay was “excessive”, adding that “the exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there”. And here she was a little later, explaining that “of course I think maternity pay is important. I was answering a different question.” I hope that clears everything up.

Touring the conference centre, it was the military men who had seized the best ground. James Cleverly (Royal Artillery) had a large, unmissable stall at the top of the escalators, offering wide fields of fire across the conference centre and easy access to resupply. Tom Tugendhat (Military Intelligence, can’t really talk about it) had led a daring overnight raid to secure a central spot in the exhibition hall. Robert Jenrick meanwhile was in a more obscure corner, and it took several hours to find Badenoch’s small stand, on a balcony that led nowhere.

Each stand offered freebies, though these were of variable quality. Badenoch was giving away apples, Jenrick extra-extra large t-shirts (presumably, as the only candidate to admit using Ozempic, he had these going spare). The clear leader, in both variety and volume, though was Tugendhat. There were sweets, biscuits, lollies, notebooks, spray-on bronzer (“Tugend-tan”), and stick-on Tugend-tattoos. It was a stall full of, well, Tugend-tat.

(This sketch is nothing if not thorough, and so tested the Tugend-Tan on what I shall call an inconspicuous area. The effect, before it was hastily wiped off with a nearby Jenrick T-shirt, was less “St Tropez” and more “liquid boot polish”. However, if anyone wishes to apply camouflage before paddling a kayak up the Birmingham canal, it might be handy.)

It would be generous to describe the conference as “packed”, and more importantly it would be untrue. If anyone in Birmingham is looking for a quiet spot for a sit-down, they could do a lot worse than toddle along. The only thing likely to make a visit stressful is the building itself, which seems to have been designed by M.C. Escher, with staircases that skip floors, promising shortcuts to your destination before leaving you stranded further away than you were when you started. At one stage Badenoch and entourage strode past, full of confidence and purpose, only to stride back again a couple of minutes later, trying their best to look as if this was intentional. You can write your own jokes.

In the hall itself the words were of taking defeat seriously, but the tone was largely complacent. There was the traditional lengthy tribute to the lost leader, the great she-elephant, the smiter of miners and seller of council houses, Margaret Thatcher (peace be upon her), and denunciations of Keir Starmer for his blasphemous removal of her portrait from his study.

Richard Fuller, the MP who is this week’s Tory Chairman, opened by apologising to activists for the behaviour of MPs over the last five years. Are some former MPs more to blame for the mess the party is in than others? Do any of them have books coming out? He was too polite to say.

He announced he had a plan to win young people back to the party. Not by anything as obvious as giving them a sniff of one day being able to own a house. No, he was going to woo them with “one of our best thinkers”. This turned out to be a reference to Daniel Hannan.

If you want to know how bad things are for the Tory party, it’s entirely possible that this is true. Hannan is a newspaper editor’s idea of an intellectual, which essentially means he can quote Shakespeare. But there’s much more to him than that. He can also quote Kipling. “This is the midnight!” he declaimed. “Let no star delude us. Dawn is very far.” Were there causes for hope? Of course there were. “There are huge problems that have gone unaddressed in this country!” he revealed. If anyone can identify a group of people who have been involved in that unaddressing, they should drop Hannan a line at the House of Lords.

Finally, we got a taste of what we could have had, if MPs had made some different choices a couple of years ago. Yes, it was Penny Mordaunt. “I’m here to cheer you all up!” she told the hall, before listing some nice things that had happened this year. “The Royal Navy intercepted 160 million quid’s worth of cocaine!”

As we try to understand why this badly beaten party is so perky, we should consider the possibility that they’ve dropped the whole lot into the conference water supply.