Reaching the end of another party conference season yesterday felt like crossing the finish line after an ultramarathon across the Sahara. I’m relieved, I’m exhausted, and my body will be paying the price for a while to come.

No two years are exactly alike, of course, and the rogue element this time round was the recent arrival of a prime minister who many people seem to quite like.

It was intriguing to watch how each of the parties responded. Labour was obviously ecstatic, while the Lib Dems didn’t appear to know what to do with a PM who shares so many of their priorities.

Reform UK preferred to essentially pretend it wasn’t happening – I remember one Lee Anderson speech where he went on an extended riff about various members of the Starmer government who, by that point, had been relegated to the backbenches.

So what about the Tories? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they haven’t settled on anything specific yet. But over the past few days, I’ve seen the first signs of an opposition party actually figuring out how to take Andy Burnham on.

On my first night in Birmingham, I was speaking to one of the top members of Kemi Badenoch’s team. He used a phrase you might hear a fair bit from the Tories in the coming weeks and months, arguing that the PM doesn’t have a plan for the country but just a few ‘pet projects’.

Then I watched Kemi Badenoch in her closing speech at the conference.

There have been astonishingly few PMQs encounters between the Labour and Tory leaders considering Burnham’s been in power since July, so this was a fun preview of what we can expect when things kick off again later this month.

A recurring theme was that Burnham wants to ‘live in the past’, that he’s using nostalgia as a strategy, and aims to ‘turn back the clock to the 1970s’ – all references to his belief the country took a wrong turn under Margaret Thatcher in the eighties.

She also brought up his time working under Jeremy Corbyn as shadow home secretary: ‘Nodding along to a man who wanted to take the UK out of Nato, give up our nuclear deterrent, and even disband our army.’

As usual, it was the pettier jibes that stuck out, like calling Burnham a ‘Paddington Bear prime minister’ who was ‘hoping that the problems go away’ while Putin attacks allies.

Badenoch warned the conference: ‘Don’t let this man fool you with his fluttering eyelashes and his pork scratchings.’

Is this going to work? It’s hard to imagine a bolder repudiation to the PM’s insistence that he wants Westminster to focus on ‘problem-solving, not point-scoring’. (Whether there’s ever been a realistic possibility of that happening is another matter.)

Badenoch is a politician who revels in winding up her opponents and having debates that are as brash and public as possible. Her supporters love it – and the public also seemed to, when it was against Sir Keir Starmer.

Thanks to Kemi, we’ll soon find out if that same approach will win out in the new era.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, .

MORE: Kemi Badenoch vows to axe inheritance tax on family homes if Tories win next election

MORE: Where Labour voters are doing their weekly shop might surprise you

MORE: Kemi Badenoch says Green Party is ‘full of antisemites’ after Zionism vote