Kemi Badenoch's crowd-pleasing speech exposed one problem the Conservatives need to fix

“We have to be different, different from Labour and different from the party we were two years ago,” Mrs Badenoch told a packed conference hall in Birmingham.

Still, given the Tories had spent the best part of a decade tearing themselves apart, Mrs Badenoch has at least managed to reinvigorate them with some good humour.

The depleted ranks of Conservative councillors and activists lapped up Mrs Badenoch’s joke-filled, cheer-charged opening.

“Birmingham, a city with so many canals that some people call Venice ‘the Birmingham of the Mediterranean’,” came her opening zinger, greeted by howls of laughter.

Youthful cheers followed when the 46-year-old Tory leader pointed out that there were 50 per cent more young people at conference this year.

And, naturally, there were whoops and claps when she confidently predicted that the Conservatives would win the next general election.

The mood was upbeat and the message was undoubtedly optimistic.

For a party still recovering from a historic election defeat, that is no small achievement.

But Mrs Badenoch was also keen to accuse her rivals of harking back to the past rather than fixing the problems ahead.

Andy Burnham certainly exposed himself last week as being every bit as obsessed by Margaret Thatcher as many of the Iron Lady’s loyal disciples.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats’ jamboree in Brighton revealed that anyone donning a tangerine tie seems to believe history went wrong in 2016, with the Greens voting to rewind the clock to before 1948 just a few weeks later.

For Mrs Badenoch, however, the vision is simultaneously more recent and looking further ahead.

“When I said I needed to change the Conservative Party, I meant it,” the Tory leader said.

“I didn’t just mean changing our policies, like on net zero and the ECHR, though I have done that

“And I didn’t just mean booting out the plotters and the badly behaved, though we’ve done that, too.

“I meant something much more fundamental. A Conservative Party that knows what it stands for, a Conservative Party that knows what it believes, and knows who its people are.”

However, just moments after blasting her reverse-pedalling rivals, Mrs Badenoch could not stop herself from looking back even further.

Rewinding to 1976, the Tory leader was keen to detail how Mrs Thatcher forged her path to power, specifically following the publication of Keith Joseph’s The Right Approach.

“We governed for 18 years after that because we started with the right foundations, and we are going to do the same again,” Mrs Badenoch pledged.

While Mrs Badenoch admitted things are tougher now than in 1976, she was not shying away from taking the battle head-on.

“For too long, politicians have announced targets and devised complicated schemes without asking what was actually causing the problems,” Mrs Badenoch explained.

“Lots of people are trying to fix the symptoms, but I want to fix the causes.”

And it would not be party conference season without a joke about Labour failing when it follows its deep-rooted socialist principles.

“We fail when we don’t follow ours,” she said of the dying days of the last Tory Government.

There is no doubt Mrs Badenoch looked to channel her inner Iron Lady, with tough talk and certainly no fear about being disliked.

However, Mrs Badenoch’s fun-loving, character-building “festival of ideas” in Birmingham appears to miss one problem for the Tories — and the Conservative leader made a somewhat subtle reference to it.

“No other party has published a diagnosis of this country’s problems,” she said. “They haven’t set it out because they haven’t even thought about it.”

The problem for Mrs Badenoch, in this instance at least, is that plenty of voters may reasonably wonder whether the Tories know so much about the country’s problems because they spent 14 years helping to create them.

A ‘Boriswave’ flood of legal migration, soaring NHS waiting lists and an economic shock courtesy of Liz Truss are not problems that appeared from nowhere.

Many Tories will find the constant badgering about 14 years rather boring, I’m sure.

However, the stories continue to hamper attempts to put their time in power behind them — including the case of two small-boat migrants who arrived under Tory rule and were later charged with plotting to commit a terror attack.

And that gets to the heart of Mrs Badenoch’s problem: The Leader of the Opposition is far more popular than the brand she is trying to sell.

Recent polling put her favourability at 27 per cent, while the Conservatives hover around on just 21 per cent.

To put it frankly, Mrs Badenoch beats Nigel Farage in head-to-head polling, yet the Tories still trail Reform UK in most recent polls.

Perhaps that is why the recent announcements suggest a retreat towards the Blue Wall rather than a fight with Reform UK.

Policies such as ending the £100,000 childcare cliff edge and flirting with inheritance tax cuts speak far more directly to the seats swallowed up by the Liberal Democrats, while Reform UK is hoping that increasing the personal allowance to £15,000 will help it win over “alarm-clock Britain”.

The question for Mrs Badenoch is whether she can build a coalition broad enough to make that strategy work, while presenting the Conservatives as a changed party.

There is certainly an echo of William Hague’s attempt to rebuild the Conservatives after their catastrophic 1997 defeat, with the same fighting talk about "common sense", "clear convictions" and "unity" harbouring support in the conference hall.

However, the 2001 General Election did not deliver the Conservative recovery Lord Hague had hoped for.

Fortunately for Mrs Badenoch, she has a few days to put her new-and-improved Shadow Cabinet colleagues on full display.

A showing from Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith will look to reassure voters about the economy tomorrow, while Tuesday looks set to be a defence and national security bonanza.

The jokes may have warmed up the Conservative faithful. The harder test now is whether Mrs Badenoch’s colleagues can turn the festival of ideas into something that looks, sounds and feels like a government-in-waiting.

Maybe, just maybe, the Tories will then be able to drag their support in line with Mrs Badenoch's own approval rating.