No sighting of Mayor Johnson yet, though I've made mobile contact with his lieutenants who are, no doubt, even as I type, hearing him rehearse the dazzling repertoire of quips, Latin quotations and impeccably on-message Cameronian policy principles he'll surely be wowing the punters with in a few minutes' time. His deputy for policing Kit Malthouse is here, as is Roger Evans, the new leader of the Assembly's Conservative group and Andrew Gimson, his biographer. And there are fans: ladies in the lunch queue whose smiles became a bit more fixed when they saw from my pass that I'm a chappy from the Guardian; a young man sitting towards the back of the main hall, who told me he thought Boris would be the day's star turn.
Oops. Who was that on the stage just now? Only David Cameron wearing his very thoughtful frown, explaining to the dimmer among the delegates that the message from this conference would be one of empathy with those fellow Britons presently being credit crunched and of positive plans for making sure that the mess Gordon's made of everything would never be made again. He also reminded them, as if firing a warning shot at any Trotskyist entryists, that there would be no "gratuitous attacks" on markets or the City heard this week.
That part was rather nicely in line with Mayor Johnson's recent Telegraph column - ker-ching! - in which he upbraided those throwing a blanket of condemnation over London's bankers. And now I pause to ask myself why that thought occurred to me; why I've even entertained the possibility that Cameron was taking his queue from our dear mayor. The answer is that people - well journalists, anyway - are keenly interested in the relationship between the two Old Etonians and whether it is really true that Mayor Johnson yearns for the top job in the Conservative Party and, indeed, to become prime minister.
Perhaps the subject preoccupies hacks too much. I think it probably does. And does our dizzy blond really have enough of the right stuff? The nerve, the lust, the appetite for war? And yet...a phone call comes from a Boris aide. "Is he nervous?" I inquire. "One of the few things that's disconcerting about him," I'm told, "is that he's absolutely fearless." Look out, Dave.
