This year’s Tory Conference will ditch the dreadful visuals of minor Cabinet ministers speaking to mostly empty auditorium. Last year 29 individual keynote speeches were made from the main stage. This year’s conference cuts that number down to just seven.

Major speeches will only be made by the Prime Minister, Chancellor, Foreign, and Home Secretaries, Party Chairman, and London Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey with one shorter presentation by the Education Secretary too. Other ministers will only be able to grace the main stage in the form of panel discussions, bunching them into groups of three or four taking to the stage at the same time. Journalists who have had to sit through years of minor boasts from borderline non-entities will be breathing a sigh of relief…