MANCHESTER, England — The Conservative Party has lost a majority and not yet found a role.

Faced with a radical opposition growing in confidence and momentum, Theresa May began laying out her strategy for survival at the Tory conference this week: tactical retreat.

Whereas last year May bathed in the collective relief of a party united after the shock of the Brexit referendum, the prime minister's authority collapsed in the face of June's botched general election and slow progress in Brexit negotiations.

According to some of May’s most senior advisers, the prime minister says the answer to Jeremy Corbyn’s populism is not to aggressively counter attack with a new vision or her own blue strain of radicalism but to accept the new reality after June's general election and offer specific, targeted policies that begin to answer people’s concerns.

In response to Labour's pledge to scrap university fees, the Tories dumped a planned increase in the annual cost of tuition, freezing undergraduate fees at £9,250 a year in England, and hiked the starting salary at which graduates will begin paying their loans back. May also announced billions more to help families buy their first home.

The announcements barely caused a ripple.

“It shows just how hard it is to get traction,” said one of May’s most senior aides in frustration. “But we cannot get into a bidding war with Corbyn. We can’t win that.”

What's missing is a bigger picture, a narrative that these policy pieces add up to.

The looming threat of a botched Brexit is too glaring for some of May's MPs.

“Who says we need a vision,” said the No. 10 aide when pressed on the piecemeal nature of the prime minister’s offer.

According to conversations with senior aides familiar with May’s thinking, the PM and her husband Philip — ever-present at her side this week — say the country wants concrete, deliverable reforms and over time Corbyn’s giveaways will be seen as undeliverable.

As another No. 10 official explained: “It’s about quiet competence, not grand visions. It’s the stuff we didn’t have at the last election — consumer offers you can talk about on the doorstep.”

This attitude will infuse May's keynote conference address Wednesday. According to extracts of the speech briefed to the media in advance, she will say that the party must not obsess about "our concerns, but the issues, the problems, the challenges, that concern [the British public]." The speech is an echo of her infamous "nasty party" address to the Conservative conference in 2002 when she warned: "Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies."

In May's set piece address Wednesday she will return to the theme, urging the party to take on the challenges facing ordinary people today. "Not focusing on our future, but on the future of their children and their grandchildren — doing everything we can to ensure their tomorrow will be better than our today."

Tory delegates in Manchester are starting to worry. Are they like a British Conservative version of Hillary Clinton, unable to cope with the building populist wave?

In Manchester, party activists reach for an analogy closer to home: Gordon Brown in 2010. After the 2008 financial crash, David Cameron came to power on a mission to save the economy by reducing the deficit. By contrast, Brown offered managerialism, while the Labour government's previous strategic mission — saving Britain’s public services — was seen by the public as largely complete.

Tory activists said they fear history repeating itself in reverse, with Labour enjoying a renewed sense of purpose and the Tories offering nothing but quiet, plodding governance.

Brexit revolution

Brexit haunts the Conservatives.

Inside No. 10 there is weary acknowledgement that a platform of small, consumer offers to make life easier for ordinary people will be blown out of the water if Brexit goes wrong.

“Yes, if we are offering good management we need to be good at managing,” said one of May’s aides.

The looming threat of a botched Brexit is too glaring for some of her MPs.

“I can’t escape the fact that what has actually been determined last year is a revolution. The question is: Can we carry out a revolution without victims?" former Attorney General and prominent Brexit skeptic Dominic Grieve told a fringe meeting.

At a separate fringe event, Grieve said the Conservative Party needed to return to delivering “quiet government,” but to do so it needed to begin making compromises on Brexit. “We are at risk of being seen as delivering plenty of unquiet government and a lot of strident noise and I don’t think the electorate will repay us with gratitude for such a prolonged period of this type.

“We should reassert our values of being the party of good and quiet governance," he said. "That requires compromise, it requires common sense and it requires above all as Conservatives avoiding ideological polemic when in fact there are sensible solutions which respect above all people’s freedoms and their right to live in peace and under the rule of law.”

Even David Davis, the ardent Brexiteer and the secretary of state tasked with delivering Britain’s exit from the European Union, admitted that the consequences of things going wrong were “enormous.”

“The job the prime minister has entrusted to me is to keep a calm eye on our goal and not be diverted,” he told delegates in his main conference speech. “Because the prizes for success are enormous. As are the consequences of failure.”

George Freeman, chairman of the Conservative Policy Forum, said that without meaningful domestic reform the Tories will be remembered as “the tin eared managers of austerity who celebrated Brexit more than our democratic duty to the people who we serve.”

Blue Corbynism?

But is quiet governance — even if the Tories can pull it off — enough against growing enthusiasm for Corbyn and his platform of popular socialism?

In Manchester, activists rallied around May and ministers have declared loyalty from the stage, but support is half-hearted.

On the short walk from the four-star Midland Hotel where she is staying, to the conference center, May and her husband are left almost entirely untroubled. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the backbench MP and star among members, is mobbed everywhere he goes, offering unapologetic conservatism, praising Brexit as the next in a long line of patriotic national victories going back to Agincourt.

“It wasn’t flat at the southeast reception,” one of May’s closest personal allies said at a private reception with the prime minister. “It was all ‘hey, hey, Theresa May!’” Corbyn’s aides are unlikely to be overly concerned that this anthem will take off like their own.

Senior Tories said May remained in place solely to manage Brexit. One Cabinet minister, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that faced with negotiations with the EU in Brussels and within her Cabinet at home, there was no appetite for more uncertainty.

The Cabinet minister said this explained why grassroots Tories were losing patience with Boris Johnson over his mischief making, Brexit "red lines" and public interventions.

The foreign secretary, who once enjoyed Mogg-like status as the members' darling at party gatherings, is now the butt of jokes; his attempt to set out his own red lines on Brexit received short shrift from Cabinet colleagues who cleaved to May for fear of Corbyn.

Britain, said Davis during his conference speech, trains the best diplomats in the world, "and puts them to the test by sending them to work for the foreign secretary." Defense Secretary Michael Fallon was less gentle with Johnson's bruised pride, including no fewer than three jibes in his address to the conference hall. In his own speech, Johnson delivered typical rhetorical flourishes and a vision of British exceptionalism, but his stock is increasingly low among MPs who dislike division at the top, according to a number who spoke to POLITICO.

One activist speaking ahead of the conference said the mood in the party was one of resigned unhappiness.

“Am I happy with Theresa May? No. Do I think she should go? No. Nobody is comfortable with where we are [on Brexit]. I am almost convinced that 40 percent of the public don’t give a damn. It is like trying to cook a dinner for a vegetarian and a meat eater — you are trying to create a recipe for something nobody has the stomach for.”