The Conservative Party conference felt muted this year: fewer ministerial speeches and announcements, fewer excited young activists — and far fewer attendees than Labour ever managed to muster. Boris Johnson’s speech was shorter than usual, came with almost no new announcements (aside from “faster broadband”), and wasn’t followed by the usual press huddle with his staff to answer questions. Even Jeremy Corbyn’s speech the week before at the Labour conference was longer, and his team had drastically shortened it when news came that MPs would be forced to rush back to the House of Commons after the UK Supreme Court declared Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament illegal.

It’s clear now that Boris Johnson has no desire to thrash out a deal on leaving the European Union. Instead, he’s appealing to the far right of the party, the hard fringe who want to crash out with no deal, relying on World Trade Organization rules rather than creating new rules in agreement with the EU. The offer Johnson put forward during the conference was deliberately designed to be rejected by the EU and Ireland, a purely performative deal concocted exclusively to give Johnson something to point at, to claim that the EU was immovable and wanted to see the UK punished for leaving.

The entire period has been punctuated by wild and aggressive briefings from an anonymous “Number 10 source,” happily tweeted out and published by lobby journalists with no critical analysis. The general public are deeply critical of this practice, knowing that many of the briefings are from Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s supposed mastermind, and many feel that he should put his name to these claims. On the other hand, the practice also means that any briefings from anonymous “Number 10 sources” are assumed to be Cummings and dismissed immediately.