Why Akshata Murty’s soft power game at Tory conference was a winning move

She stepped out from the shadows in a sharp designer coral trouser suit, vertiginous black pumps with admirably solid heels. Few things are more maddening than super-wealthy people dressing in Zara to show how ordinary they are, but the £875 suit from The Fold was something you knew Akshata Murty, the wife of Rishi Sunak, might actually choose to wear.

Loyalty to husband, to family and to political tribe is everything when placed on the conference stage. And on Wednesday Murty played that part like a pro. Thankfully there was none of the hint of “surrendered wife” (I don’t interfere! Please forget I have a dolphin tattoo!) that often crept into the demure, tasteful dresses of Samantha Cameron.

And the sartorial display was a decided step up from the cottage-core dresses of Carrie Johnson, who would waft through the conference as if she’d just escaped an episode Little House on the Prairie. And so the stage was set for the Prime Minister’s wife to show off her husband’s best side.

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We learnt nothing, yet absolutely everything from her speech. Rishi and Akshata are “best friends”, a team, Rishi really does like rom coms and he went into politics in order to help others have the (considerable) advantages his family have enjoyed in the UK. Murty’s delivery had a beautiful controlled charm – and you can’t manufacture that. Most important of all, it felt fond in a recognisably wifely way: “He is fun, he is thoughtful, he is compassionate and he has an incredible zest for life”

The speech was instantly soothing for a Conservative audience who don’t like strong flavours, but had experienced nothing but for the past few days. And no-one had been gripped by the slumbering male beasts this year, when they had the snarling tigresses to enthral them.

The show of naked ambition – because this is clearly about jostling for position, should Sunak lose the next election – had been on full display. After Liz Truss tanked the UK economy as surely as a Bond baddie nose-diving a jet into the mouth of a live volcano, the Conservative Party was in need of one thing: a beacon of female sanity.

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Instead, it got Suella Braverman, who would have you think expressing sympathy for migrants risking their lives in tiny boats was a “luxury belief”, rather than common and garden human decency. Penny Mordaunt has many qualities – charisma, strong arms, good diction and statement hair. We all knew she’d got a personal boost when she was chosen to carry the Sword of State at Charles III’s coronation, but we didn’t realise it would make her believe she was Penny the Lionheart. Her “stand up and fight” (repeated 12 times, like a malfunctioning android) speech at conference was rapidly voted most bizarre moment of Tory conference in a schedule packed with likely contenders.

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And if Mordaunt was like a fairground bare-knuckle boxer, who no one wants to take on, Kemi Badenoch was also engaged in mortal combat, but at least she knew what battle she wanted to undertake: the fight for “common sense”. It was hardly Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, but where are the pesky French when you need them? Braverman gave both would-be Boudiccas a run for their money by launching an offensive on the most perilous threat to modern society: the “privileged woke minority”. Forget criminal gangs and county lines’ drug runners (which have flourished under 13 years of coalition and Tory rule), modern Britain is really at threat from non-binary, culture wars warriors.

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But if these women were powered by politics, Akshata Murty’s “unplanned” speech was powered by an agenda no more complicated than wanting to support her husband. It was exactly what was needed to reassure Middle England that the words “Conservative woman” aren’t eternally synonymous with “deranged megalomaniac”. A welcome reminder that in insecure times, it’s possible for two people, at the top of life’s tree, to love and be there for each other.

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The party apparatchiks would have you believe Murty’s speech was a last-minute moment of wifely serendipity, whereas it was clearly scripted and rehearsed. But that kind of routine political panto doesn’t bother the punters. What matters is that Murty appeared likeable, estimable, reliable, intelligent and normal (as normal as you can be, when you’re a billionaire’s daughter). By showing up, she endowed Sunak with those qualities by intimate association.

Now, the fascinating question is whether Keir Starmer will follow suit and put his wife centre stage. Although the last time a Labour leader did that it was Gordon Brown and he still lost the election. Perhaps Victoria Starmer should borrow that sword and prepare to take to the battlefield.