The President is a cut-price Andrew Jackson, a touchy, uneducated, intuitive patriot ready at a moment’s provocation to get into a fight.
There is a spirit of liberty at this event, informed by the belief that traditional British freedom includes the right not just to make a lot of noise, but to be extremely rude.
Andrew Roberts manages to bring the great man before us in all his variousness in just under a thousand pages.
As Attorney General, he is telling his Cabinet colleagues what any proposals for a deal really mean – even if that’s inconvenient for Downing Street.
The despondent faces of grown-up people on the Labour benches suggested they know his measures will be very hard to oppose.
An ominous calm reigned and one half expected the Prime Minister to choose a hymn to match.
And he asks: why did the Women and Equalities Select Committee choose an adviser open to the charge of being parti pris?
But the Scottish Conservative leader cannot shed any light in her new book on the atrocious abuse directed against women on social media.
A Conservative MP who has seen much of Collins says: “I like him. He’s more intelligent and thoughtful than his public manner gives one to expect.”
She said the bare minimum on Brexit and Corbyn has no idea how to get anything more out of her.
Theresa May has mastered all the necessary pieties and used them to bludgeon her opponents into submission.
The former Foreign Secretary says May’s team are inexperienced in EU negotiations and are “pushing out disinformation”.
A new book, White Flag?, tries to sound the alarm. Will anyone listen?
The only excitement was provided by the Attorney-General, who did a warm-up act in which he looked like Rumpole auditioning to be Henry V.
He raised his listeners’ spirits in a way that no other speaker at this tepid and uncertain conference has managed.