There is a queue of the party faithful waiting to get into the hall stretching right round the building. Guido is sat in the increasingly restless media suite backstage at the conference waiting for Dave’s 2pm speech. You can guage the esteem that Guido is held in by the fact that he is positioned right at the back with the foreign press agency reporters next to the Japanese reporter. The hacks are pissed off that they will have to hang around without getting an advance text allowing them to write their skeleton stories before Dave has even stood up to speak.

The photographers are poised to kick open the firedoors as soon as Dave’s car arrives in the building in order to get an unstaged snap. That will impress Special Branch.

Iain Dale and the rest of the Tory bloggers are sat in their own blogging bunker with internet connections. Bizarrely they seem to be better served than the media hacks who have been complaining all week that they keep losing their wireless connections.