Enjoy this pro-Israel government while it lasts

The lack of coordination was evident in other areas of policy, including the embassy move. A few hours before the CfI reception, a senior Foreign Office aide suggested that Ms Truss’s commitment to her “review” might be liable to revision. This was wrong, but the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister did not seem to be on the same page.

A few days earlier, the Labour Party in Liverpool had looked and sounded like a government in waiting: disciplined and energetic. There seemed to be at least twice as many present at the Labour Friends of Israel reception as there were at CfI’s.

Thanks to the unfortunate fact that Ms Truss is to make her keynote speech on Yom Kippur, I write this on Tuesday morning, the day before her only chance to save her government. Maybe, by the time you read this, she will have pulled off something dazzling. But the prospects do not look good.

Take Mr Kwarteng. He not only took a PhD from Cambridge but won University Challenge and has written well-regarded books. Yet whatever one thinks of the economic logic of cutting the 45 per cent tax rate during a cost-of-living crisis, he seems not to have noticed that this would be a political gift to Labour, which Sir Keir Starmer has seized.

Then came the U-turn. When Mr Kwarteng spoke on Monday, the auditorium was, for once, full. But the Chancellor made just two flippant references to the change of direction, meaning much of the market turmoil of the preceding weeks — “a little turbulence” — had been for nothing.

“We listened, we get it,” he said. To which the party area chairman sitting next to me barked: “Oh no you don’t!”

Until well past midnight, I sat in the main conference hotel bar. It was a heaving hubbub of besuited politicians, special advisers, NGO lobbyists and Tory members that spilled out 20 people deep onto the concourse in front of the building.

Some were still in denial. One Surrey councillor was hunting for ITN political editor Robert Peston so she could scold him for his “biased”, downbeat coverage. A general election victory was still within the Tories’ grasp, she insisted, and Liz Truss was proving herself to be an outstanding PM. But she was something of an outlier.

“Enjoy it while you can,” one young parliamentary aide told me. “This may be the last time the party meets while still in power. We’re f***ed.” It was a phrase I heard time and again.

Sometimes, poll leads such as the 20-30 per cent that Labour has opened up do evaporate.

After all, the Tories polled just nine per cent nationally in the Euro elections of 2019, months before Boris Johnson scored his landslide.

But those with longer memories — including another former Cabinet member who now sits in the Lords — recalled that Mr Kwarteng’s attempt to laugh off his U-turn echoed John Major’s after Black Wednesday. After that, a floating pound and sound economic management saw Britain begin a golden era of low-inflation growth. But Tony Blair still won a landslide at the next election, five years later.

Ms Truss must go to the polls in just over two years. “Do you think they will move the embassy before the next election?” a senior Israeli diplomat asked me, plaintively. The assumption was obvious. Despite his genuine commitment to fighting antisemitism, the chances of Sir Keir opening an embassy in Jerusalem can be calculated as precisely zero.