IT WAS a bracing experience for the captains of industry. Used to being feted at Conservative Party conferences, this week they were almost as scarce as Cameroons, and little more popular. Like the leaders of the ancien régime, they have been feeling the chill winds of change. The Tories used to be reliably business-friendly, yet under Mrs May things could be rather different.

The government has sketched out a new agenda that its supporters describe as responsible capitalism. Ministers will use the state to curb what they see as abuses, and shift more power towards employees and away from the boardroom, to enhance workers’ rights, as Mrs May put it. This might be clever politics to swipe some of Labour’s crumbling vote, but could add to the burden of business regulation just at the moment when many were hoping to see it reduced by leaving the EU. The government has also talked up a new “industrial strategy”, which it promises will help business. But this remains more inchoate than the headline-grabbing pledges to bend business to Mrs May’s will.

If the bosses are grumpy about all the new regulations, so the argument goes, they only have themselves to blame. Sir Philip Green, formerly of BHS, and Mike Ashley of Sports Direct were name-checked throughout the conference, almost as frequently as they were during the Labour Party’s gathering the previous week; the scandals that hit their retail empires this year have become emblematic of all that is supposed to be wrong with Britain’s selfish, overpaid executives. Thus on October 1st it was announced that Mrs May has asked Matthew Taylor, a former head of Tony Blair’s policy unit in Downing Street, to carry out a review of employment practices, looking particularly at those on so-called “zero hours” contracts, the self-employed and temporary workers. These are the people “just managing”, in Mrs May’s phrase, without sick pay and other benefits, toiling in the warehouses of firms like Sports Direct. The review may lead to a new “workers’ charter” of rights. The government has also suggested that workers should sit on company boards.

The new home secretary, Amber Rudd, wants her pound of flesh too. Charged with the task of getting annual net migration down to the “tens of thousands” from its current level of more than 300,000, on October 4th she attacked businesses for employing too many foreigners. She said that companies could be forced to reveal the number of migrants on their books, in effect naming and shaming those that fail to take on Britons.

Those that have pushed for the Tories to become the “party of the workers”, in the phrase of Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow and a junior minister, were cheered by this new agenda. “People need to know that we are the party of the underdog,” he says: “the party of the NHS, not BHS.”

Businessmen were less impressed. Few details were provided about the new industrial strategy, other than warm words about helping the regions and a bit of money for high-tech industries. One owner of a ceramics business in Stoke said that he had heard nothing about removing the obstacles to helping his business grow, such as reducing business rates or energy prices. Terry Scuoler, the head of EEF, a manufacturers’ lobby group, argued that business was being penalised for the behaviour of a few “bad apples”. Many also attacked the home secretary’s proposals to make it more difficult to hire overseas. Yet with Labour calling for a revival of socialism, Mrs May will not worry too much about businessfolk griping. To which party, she might ask, are they going to defect?