We were, the announcer said, about  to hear from “a renowned former member of the Cabinet”. For a moment, I was confused, because the programme said the next speaker was David Frost.

The moments of applause in his address were a useful guide to the demonology of the modern right

There’s a stage of middle age where you realise that you simply don’t understand modern life. It’s not that you dislike a hit song, it’s that you no longer have any idea what songs are hits or why. I feel this way about David Frost – or, to give him his full title, as the National Conservatism conference did, the Right Honourable Lord Frost of Allenton PC CMG. We keep being assured that he is a profound thinker, the future of the Tories. Why? How does this manifest itself? Unless you feel it, you can’t understand it. It’s like Ed Sheeran, or bubble tea.

His appearance on Wednesday offered few clues. He listed all the many ways in which Britain is a terrible place, but unfortunately skipped the page in his speech where he explained how these should be fixed. Instead, we got a lot of attacks on people on Twitter who are mean. This has been one of the big themes of Nat Con: current or recent government ministers announcing that the country is a mess and then asking why people on social media say they’re useless.

Still, the moments of applause in his address were a useful guide to the demonology of the modern right. Frost and the audience were against, in no particular order: lockdowns, immigration, modern architecture and taking down statues of racists. As a platform for a historic fifth term in office, it’s a bit thin.

Rayner sounding long-winded, and Dowden shrieky

Frost does have a huge redeeming feature: he has absolutely no self-awareness. For instance, his observation that “plenty of people in this country have accumulated unearned wealth over the last 20 years or have established positions of privilege through government action” is unarguable. I just didn’t expect to hear it from a member of the House of Lords addressing a room full of people most of whom surely owned their own homes. Indeed, their reaction to mention of tighter rules for landlords suggested the presence of at least a few rentiers.

“Our opponents are completely out of touch,” his Lordship explained. “They’re completely deranged by perfectly normal and widely supported ideas.” And also well ahead of you in the polls.

From Frost, we piled over to the Commons for Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. Rishi Sunak was on his way to Japan. In his place was new DPM Oliver Dowden, who was greeted with hearty cheers from his own side and one very small “Boo!” Perhaps Dominic Raab was hiding somewhere out of sight.

Everyone was pleased for Dowden, because he’s spent years contorting himself to suck up to whoever was currently in power, and it had finally paid off. There are a lot of MPs who are encouraged to see that this approach can work. He looked terribly proud to be there, like a seven-year-old playing Buzz Aldrin in the class play about the Space Race.

Everything slightly went downhill from there. Labour’s Angela Rayner asked incredibly long questions, whose point got lost along the way. This was surprising, because she was pretty good at putting Raab on the spot. Dowden, meanwhile, turns out to get quite shrill when he’s under pressure. Politics is an unfair business, and both appearance and voice matter. If I could offer some advice to Dowden, it would be this: when they go low, don’t go quite so high.

It was an exchange that both somehow managed to lose: Rayner sounding long-winded, and Dowden shrieky. At one stage he said he’d “not take any lectures” from Rayner about “the lives of working people”, on the grounds that he’d been to a comprehensive school. This was a line that worked when Michael Howard tried it on Tony Blair, but you have to have left school very early to beat Rayner in a deprived-background battle.

Things were little better when the SNP’s Mhairi Black asked why Brexit was going so badly. Dowden ignored this and urged her to focus instead on improving life in Scotland. After all, he said, “the SNP has been in power for 13 years.” The rest of his answer was drowned out by opposition laughter. Like Frost, Dowden lacks a self-awareness function. Perhaps that’s just how you need to be if you hope to be a renowned former member of the Cabinet.