Enjoy the applause from Conservative activists now, Theresa May, job will get harder

THERESA MAY is the Tories’ Harry Kane. Like the Spurs striker, she is one of their own.

She joined the party as a teenager, met her husband at a Tory disco and still goes out leafletting on the weekend. She is also much closer to the activists in age than Cameron was: He was 39 when he became leader, she is 60 today.

All this help explains the rapturous reception she will get when she takes to the stage tomorrow to address the conference for the first time as leader.

But Mrs May should enjoy the applause, because her job is about to get a lot harder.

She is taking the unusual step of speaking on the opening day of conference because she wants to get Brexit out of the way as soon as she can. Number 10 hope this will clear the decks for talk about domestic policy for the rest of the week.

In her main address on Wednesday, Mrs May plans to focus on how she wants a, “Better deal for ordinary working people”.

But those hoping for specifics on Brexit are going to be disappointed. One Downing Street source tells me Mrs May’s speech will be about “showing momentum”, emphasising how she has been engaging with business and foreign leaders.

Number 10 says Mrs May will not set a date for invoking Article 50, the two-year process for leaving the EU, tomorrow.

Her Cabinet allies are dismissive of those pushing for a timetable on this. “It is not gripping the country. But it is gripping ministers who feel the need to say something quotable,” one tells me.

I understand that when the Brexit Cabinet Committee last met a couple of weeks ago, ministers were still giving their views on what to do, rather than trying to settle the Government’s negotiating position. Mrs May closed the meeting, with the message: “No running commentary please.”

“Having told everyone else not to provide a running commentary, she can’t do so herself,” says one committee member. But diplomatic negotiations can’t be conducted entirely in secret these days. Not least because some on the other side of this negotiation are keen to put the worst possible spin on Britain’s position as they try to poach business from this country.

Industry and the City also need to know, at least, what the British Government is trying to achieve. Without that, they warn, they are simply going to have to assume the worst-case scenario.

The Brexit ministers have tried to give more definition to what Brexit means. But their attempts have been slapped down by Number 10. This has caused some unhappiness. “We are being done for stating the bleeding obvious,” one of them has been heard to protest.

Part of the problem, as one Cabinet minister explains, is that Number 10 is, “Still working out who it can trust”.

But Mrs May needs to sort this pronto. For there is an increasing view among ministers that “Brexit means Brexit” can’t hold as a line for that much longer, and certainly not past the New Year.

Mrs May wants the conference message to be that her Government will deliver “a better deal for ordinary working people, and a better deal for Britain abroad”.

But she needs to start showing voters how she is going to do that.

THREE weeks ago, Theresa May gave a speech setting out her plans for more grammar schools. It was a big, bold case.

But since then she has gone quiet on the subject. She hasn’t been out there pushing the argument forward.

This worries even those ministers supportive of the policy change. They point out that it is fine for Prime Ministers to make big, controversial arguments, but they then have to win them. Mrs May even failed to knock back Jeremy Corbyn when he raised grammars at PMQs.

Her absence from the debate has created a vacuum which has been filled by opponents of selection.

Labour is today having a national campaign day under the emotive heading Education Not Segregation.

More worryingly for No 10, the last Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, has come out against the idea, along with Ark, one of the best academy chains in the country, and Teach First, which puts tops graduates into teaching jobs in deprived areas. These people can’t be dismissed as the enemies of promise or just the usual left-wing suspects.

We will hear more about grammar schools at the Tory conference this week. But this three-week delay has handed the initiative to opponents of the Prime Minister’s plans.

THE Tories pride themselves on being the party of law and order.

So there is mounting concern at the top of government about how close to meltdown the prison system is.

More than 60 per cent of jails are overcrowded and serious assaults by prisoners are up by almost a third.

One of the things driving the increase in violence in prisons is the wide availability of psychoactive substances. In many jails they are simply being chucked over the wall.

I understand the Treasury is now ready to sign off on the construction of six new prisons by 2020 in an attempt to get the situation under control.

Osborne hopes to fly again

DAVID CAMERON might no longer be an MP but his political partnership with George Osborne remains alive.

I am told by someone who knows both men well that when Craig Oliver, the last Prime Minister’s communications director, told his former boss he was writing a book about the EU referendum campaign, Cameron urged him to make sure that Osborne came out of it well.

Oliver himself won’t discuss what conversa­tions he has had with Cameron about the book.

Cameron’s attitude means that Osborne can also be confident that the former PM’s memoirs – which Cameron is cracking on with – won’t do him any harm. That is not something all of his former colleagues can say.

For Osborne, how he comes across in these first drafts of history matters.

If he is to succeed in making a comeback, he’ll need his role in the Cameron project to be seen positively.

It will be a disaster for him if he is just remembered for the misjudgments of the referendum campaign.

At the moment, Osborne returning to the top table seems unlikely.

But as the past 18 months have reminded us, politics is not a predictable business.

And unlike Cameron, Osborne has no intention of quitting.

He has been emphatic to friends that politics beats making money any day of the week.

James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator