Looming ominously over the door of this year’s Conservative party conference was plastered one word: OPPORTUNITY.

The giant word, presumably this year’s slogan, hung there all week, with no context, no explanation. It loomed behind cabinet members as they deliver their speeches. It loomed on the side of the building.

Nobody knows whose opportunity it is, or what possibilities it might represent. All week, there it remained: a huge, monolithic metaphor for a party now so suffocated by the hypotheticals of Brexit that it is struggling to articulate anything else.

Most of this year’s conference seemed a far cry from the speech Theresa May gave on the steps of Downing Street in July 2016, in which she promised to wage war on the ‘burning injustice’ of poverty and inequality, a focus on the people who are ‘just about managing’. For the many, as opposed to the few.

Two years later, when you stripped Brexit - and Boris Johnson - out of 2018's gathering, it was often genuinely hard to work out what the government is actually doing, or where Theresa May’s social justice agenda has been hiding. Until she addressed conference on Wednesday morning, when she unveiled new plans to allow councils to borrow to build – a policy that will be genuinely welcomed on both sides of the local government political divide – it was easy to suspect the agenda no longer existed.

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On the edges, many frustrated moderate Tories were worried.

At one fringe event about millennial voters, a calmly angry woman in the audience summed up the problem.

She was there to speak on behalf of her three children, she said, all of them in their 20s.

“They are all three likely to vote Labour,” she told the meeting. “One is a young teacher, one is a young nurse. One has just finished zero-contract working for four years and is now a teaching assistant in a school for excluded pupils.

“Yesterday in the hall I heard some wonderful warm words: things like ‘we are a party of opportunity for all so that none get left behind’, ‘we are the party that doesn’t want to leave people in poverty’.

“Well I am here for us on their behalf, saying they feel left behind.

“They feel poor.”

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Unless the party addresses turns the warm words into actual policies, she added, the ‘crosses will not go in the blue box’.

This concern echoed around the non-Brexit fringe events I went to all week in search of the party’s domestic agenda. For those Tories who can see past the parallel internal wars over Chequers and Theresa May’s successor, worry is in the air. They have gone from dismissing Jeremy Corbyn as a hard-left lunatic to genuinely fearing him.

At the same fringe on millennial voters, former cabinet minister Justine Greening spoke of the party’s headspace having been ‘crunched down’, first by the need to balance the books after the crash, and now by Brexit.

“That’s not been good for us, because it has not allowed us to talk to the public about what our long term vision is for the country and how people are absolutely at the heart of that,” she said.

“But we have to find some space to do that, because Labour are doing it.”

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Speaking of a ‘lost generation of voters’, she referred back to that word looming over the conference.

“It is a massive opportunity,” she said. “But it’s also a massive threat. And if we don’t rise to that challenge, quite frankly we don’t deserve to be elected.”

Greening was one of several MPs around the edges to talk at conference not just about the Tories as the party of home ownership, but of the need to recognise renters as an actual group of people who vote.

“They want renting to be dealt with like any consumer good,” she told the room. “It’s a service and they want it regulated in the right way so it’s reliable. And I absolutely get that.

“But I don’t think our mind’s set in the right way to be in that place. And so we need to catch up on all of this in a really fundamental way.”

Labour knows this. As one bemused opposition MP I spoke to part way through the conference said of the government: “They identify with the landlord over the renter. But there’s never going to be as many of them as renters. It’s simple politics.”

At a housing fringe organised by the Residential Landlords Association, exactly the same sentiment was articulated by a Tory the next day: “We’re in danger of looking like a landlord’s party. And we need to look like a party for renters.”

In the shadow of Labour’s manifesto, this is an aspect of public policy to which the party – or some of it – does seem to be waking up, albeit slowly.

New housing minister Kit Malthouse was conspicuously present across the fringes all week. Notably he was prepared to argue for tighter rental regulation to a room full of Tory landlords, including the one who stood up and almost yelled at the minister: “Stop listening to Shelter. Evicting tenants every six months and doubling the rent isn’t economically viable. It’s a myth,’ before complaining about gas safety certificates. If he knew that he was standing next to two people from Shelter, presumably he didn’t care.

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But Malthouse insisted more regulation was in fact needed, calling housing – including the rental sector – the party’s ‘major priority’ aside from Brexit.

“The truth is, if we carry on the way we are, Generation Rent is going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn,” he told the grumpy landlords, firmly.

“I think we all have to face the fact that in every aspect of this market things have to change.

“If you think about it young people’s lives are changing every single day, such is the pace of change…If we’re the only thing that doesn’t change, they’re not going to reward us electorally.

“They’re going to think we’re just an afterthought and we need to address their issues and their concerns.

“And whether you like it or not, there is concern out there in the tenant body about the private rented sector. It’s a combination of resentment about feeling excluded, a resentment about not being well treated.”

So in the background, those who understand the nature of the Corbynite threat were trying to make themselves heard above Brexit.

And yet. Brexit was, really, the only show in town. And while there were glimmers of new policy around the edges, little in the way of new ideas was evident either on the edges of conference or on the main stage, up until Theresa May announced her council borrowing policy.

Apparently crippled by the expectation of further austerity – which, confusingly, the PM announced was ‘over’ in her speech, despite indications from the Chancellor earlier in conference that it was not – ministers were left to announce a few scraps. The top line of Chris Grayling’s speech, when it was sent out to the press, was £100m for some road improvements, some of which already looked familiar.

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Grayling and others continued to rely heavily on the line that Labour made a mess of things prior to 2010, an argument that is starting to wear thin for a party that has been in power for eight years.

During a regional press huddle, Tory party chair Brandon Lewis twice blamed the last Labour government for various problems, but when asked how the party is going to take on Jeremy Corbyn, his answer was simply that the Tories are doing their selections early in marginal seats.

I ran into one former senior adviser on the last day. “Brexit is killing the party,” he said, flatly.

Theresa May did, on the Wednesday morning, manage to deliver a speech that articulated, again, her one-nation, more interventionist, social justice-focused vision. It had an actual housing policy in it that should genuinely help start to solve the housing crisis, albeit dependent, as always, on the detail.

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Yet it felt like the exception to the rule, both for this conference and for the government as a whole.

It is a cliché now to say that Labour act as though they won the 2017 election. But during conference season it has felt at times as though Labour believe they are in government more than the Tories do.

And for some nervous Conservatives, there is a dawning realisation that the giant opportunity looming over their conference might not be theirs, but Jeremy Corbyn’s.