Cameron’s Team Tories find strength in numbers

It seems that being part of David Cameron’s Conservative Party at the moment is all about The Team. Wherever you were promised one minister, he or she would pop up with a flock of colleagues - except Boris Johnson, who kept the spotlight firmly to himself amid ecstatic applause.

So the audience on Tuesday morning, including a rapt Mr Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary William Hague, didn’t just get shadow housing minister Grant Shapps. They also got a couple of shadow CLG-ers, secretary of state for transport Theresa Villiers, and her team.

Mr Shapps insisted that the Tories ‘were not making a big thing’ of transport and housing being billed together in a joint main stage session at the conference. There have, however, been two housing themes at this conference. The first is localism: when power to build will be handed with a flourish to local communities, while the national government sweeps away all useless quangos and central targets (the word ‘Stalinist’ always gets a cheer here).

The other refrain coming from the affable Mr Shapps is that there is no more cash to be had. ‘It’s going to be bloody awful,’ he told one startled Tory councillor, who had been looking for reassurance.

So once the cash tap is turned off and the empowered new world of localism kicks in, what will a Tory housing team have left to do? No money to spend, no targets to tinker with… maybe it is a good thing if they start learning about what colleagues in other departments do - they may need to borrow some of their brief.

Who are the Tories’ key players on housing? See Quick guide: Top Tories