Theresa May’s speech to the Tory conference was a daring raid on the right of the Conservative party. It was not, as many commentators are saying, about making the party nasty – it was about making her leader.

She set out her stall as the hard woman who would stand up for Britain. May would control immigration and defend Britain’s borders.

She was in part forced to do it. The government promised to get immigrants down to ‘tens of thousands’ and failed, and the men in her party were likely to make her the fall woman. So she has sought to reassert her authority. But the way she did it meant she made a bid for the Eurosceptic right of the party.

Her rhetoric was not nice about immigrants, but a closer read of the speech reveals deliberately Churchillian overtones: ‘These problems [immigration] have led some people to say we need a new approach, a new European approach that would involve a common immigration and asylum policy. To those people, I have a very clear answer: Not in a thousand years. We’re not seeking to regain control of our borders with one hand, only to give it away with the other.’

But she was doing something else too: she was defining herself. Nobody is going to ask now: what does Theresa May stand for? She has told them in strong ‘nation state’, Disraelian language.

‘To those who say the problem is too great for nation states to resolve themselves, I say it can only be resolved by nation states taking responsibility themselves – and protecting their own national borders,’ she said.

It is not pretty politics, but it is clever. George Osborne is trying to dominate the centre-ground, with his living wage policy, his ‘Northern Powerhouse’, his nabbing of Andrew Adonis to chair a national infrastructure commission, and his declaration that the Tory party is ‘the true party of labour’.

David Cameron was stealing Labour’s clothes at the conference too today vowing in his speech an all-out assault on poverty and saying that he ‘would finish the fight for real equality.’

They are both up to their neck in European negotiations and in favour of remaining in the union.

In doing so they have left the right of centre-ground free, and the Eurosceptic space is splintered, with no clear leader but with lots of discredited men from bygone political ages wanting to head it. May has spotted the opportunity of being the one nation woman who brings the party together.

She has also spotted that her time is likely to be now or never – if Cameron stays leader the entire parliament she will have passed 70 and will be told she is ‘too old’.

She was launching a raid on United Kingdom Independence party territory too – that territory that the Labour party might have looked at – but that Jeremy Corbyn, has not had a chance to capture, and is probably not interested in doing anyway. Her attitude was couched like this: ‘An approach that combines hard-headed common sense with warm-hearted compassion.’

May is doing what women have to do to take power within political parties which, whatever progress has been made, retain misogynistic streaks. They need to define themselves. Yvette Cooper failed because she did not do so and Corbyn – another outsider – succeeded because he did.

Women also need to take men by surprise. Men in such parties rarely rate women. Women are not clubbable, they do not have gaggles of male supporters – but their outsider position makes them a threat if they know how to use that status properly. You only have to look at what Angela Merkel managed in Germany. She took control of the CDU, probably the most misogynistic mainstream party in Europe, and she took down the men who stood in her way, beginning with the seemingly impregnable Helmut Kohl.

The Tory boys are beginning to get the message. They were trashing May at the Spectator party last night and they trashed her this morning in the Daily Telegraph. Not from any soft-heartedness towards immigrants, but because they realised that she might be a threat. After all the Tory men have taken by surprise before – by Margaret Thatcher.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist and councillor in the London borough of Camden. She writes the PMQs on Progress column and tweets @SallyGimson

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Photo: Conservatives and European Council