Late nights, early starts and plenty of warm wine in between. Party conference season usually leaves the lobby worn down and ill. But this year’s annual Conservative meet in Birmingham was this in extremis. The depleted coffee and tea stand in the press area pointed to the adrenaline-caffeine high of four days of policy U-turns, market turmoil, blue-on-blue attacks and party plotting. I’ve covered numerous conferences in recent years, through the EU referendum, Brexit wars and days of Jeremy Corbyn. This was the wildest to date. It began on the Saturday night and went downhill from there. I remember sitting in Asha’s curry house having dinner when security started to appear from the room at the back. Liz Truss walked out, followed eventually by her aides. “She was in quite a good mood,” recalls one ally. The team, too, seemed fine, despite the ongoing fallout from the mini-budget the week before that had managed to dominate – and even overshadow – Labour’s subsequent conference. Her aides billed the conference as an important chance to reset and get a grip following a week of speculation after the markets got spooked and the pound plummeted in the face of unfunded tax cuts. But just 12 hours later, the first torpedo missile was launched – with Michael Gove pursuing an all-out attack on the then prime minister. Sitting just feet from her on the set of the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show, he called on her to U-turn on the 45p tax cut for the richest. In her interview, Truss said she wouldn’t – but by the evening, after others had made clear they agreed with Gove, it leaked that this was now her plan after all. “It all went downhill from there,” says a former adviser. “There was just a sense of completely losing grip.” Monday – referred to by a member of Team Truss as “breach of collective responsibility day” – saw the leader of the house, Penny Mordaunt, speaking out against the prospect of Truss abandoning a benefits uplift in line with inflation, and the levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, signalling his disappointment at the 45p U-turn. Meanwhile, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, used a fringe event to reveal her dream was to see a successful deportation flight of asylum seekers to Rwanda. “It was a modern day twist on Martin Luther King,” quips a former Downing Street aide. “By the time we got to Tuesday,” says a member of Truss’s team, “when I wasn’t with the prime minister, I just wanted to lie face down on my bed and pray for the world to end.” Another aide describes it simply as “the worst four days of my life”. As journalists covering the chaos, it was at times hard to know which way to look. The chaos could erupt at any moment, at a fringe event, or among the groups of despairing MPs gathered at the evening drinks receptions. By the time of the leader’s speech, there was a sense that the new prime minister had managed to steady the ship slightly – but it was clear that her premiership would not work out how she intended. Already MPs were whispering in the bars about the return of Boris Johnson or Rishi Sunak by Christmas. It was the second option that came to pass. Of course, there has been plenty of turmoil over the past seven years in politics. It’s still the case that the EU referendum and the 2017 snap election that followed turned politics on its head in a way that is yet to be repeated. But after the Tories disposed of two prime ministers and Labour won a poll swing so large that the party is currently forecast to win a landslide, this year feels like the most dramatic since. It was conference season when the consequences of the collision of the bond markets and politics really started to be felt. Katy Balls is the Spectator’s deputy political editor