At the Labour party conference in Liverpool last week, Andy Burnham floated the idea of electoral reform. This week in Birmingham, the Tories have come up with a plan of their own: voting with their feet.
How to put this nicely? Let’s just say that the Conservative party conference is extremely civilised. No queues for the food concessions. No queues to get into any of the halls. In fact, the organisers are delighted that anyone has turned up at all.
This doesn’t feel like a high-octane meeting of a party preparing for government. More like a home counties meeting of the Rotary Club. On current evidence, if there is a general election next year – as Kemi Badenoch is trying to convince us there will be – then the Tories won’t be active participants. More like vaguely disinterested observers. For these four days, Birmingham is a city where you can sit and watch the world pass you by.
Not that those who have turned up seem unhappy. Rather, they are thrilled to find themselves still alive. This time last year, there was a possibility that they faced extinction: under threat from left and right and with a leader in Kemi who looked unlikely to last six months. Since then things have stabilised as Robert Jenrick has been stopped from pulling out their ventilator in the intensive care unit. They are now merely an endangered species. The conference centre is a safari park attraction where we get to see the remnants of the Tory party in a protected habitat.
The morning’s activities take place in what is optimistically called the main hall: a hard-to-find side room with a capacity of about 200. These are way more seats than any of the acts require. First up was shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden, who managed to bore even himself. Still, at least the hall was about a third full. Which, for Rich, is a major result. I’m guessing most of the people there were family and friends.
It was no fuller for the shadow health secretary, Damian Hinds, who stumbled over his notes for five minutes. Weirdly, there were 24 people watching an empty stage online after he had left, while only 17 had been online when he was talking. Or maybe that’s not so weird.
For the afternoon offering we were moved to a slightly bigger hall. This could have been a mistake. It had come billed as a “major speech by the shadow chancellor”. Only we were made to sit through an hour and a half of nothingness – an opportunity to deliberate our own and the Tories’ existential futility – before the main event.
By now at least another third of the audience had left. A wise choice. They clearly had some idea of what was coming. Even 20 minutes of Andrew Griffith can rip your soul in half. If only I had joined them.
Not that the hall was anywhere near full to begin with. First up was the shadow Defra secretary, Victoria Atkins, who had sensibly worked out that no one in their right mind would stay to hear her talk. So instead she positioned herself as a cable TV presenter – there were 53 people watching online – chatting to her guest, Jeremy Clarkson.
This did at least lift the mood in the hall. A genuine celeb was among them for 15 minutes. However, it doesn’t say much for your conference when your most popular speaker is someone who openly says he’s not a Tory party member and has only turned up because he will go anywhere people will have him to talk about farming.
“Wow,” said Jezza. “There’s an awful lot of people here dressed as seats!” Vicky giggled nervously. The rest of the chat came and went perfectly amiably. Jezza did what he does best, giving his best impression of a multimillionaire held back by the incompetence of government. Still, at least he injected some fun. Vicky wanted to know how the farming summer had gone. He replied that the Diddly Squat farm had produced several ounces of hen food because of the extreme heat.
Someone should have told him that Griffith was about to get rid of the Climate Change Committee. If you missed any of this, you will be able to watch extended highlights on the next series of Clarkson’s Farm.
From then on, the conference became one long car crash. A panel with a couple of rightwing hacks droning on about nothing and then another panel in which one businesswoman congratulated herself on not getting stabbed on the train to Brum – apparently all her friends refuse to use trains – and then a businessman sobbing at the thought of billionaires being asked to pay inheritance tax. Some of them are so sick with worry they can no longer sleep.
Finally the main attraction. What would turn out to be a landmark occasion for all party conferences. Because Griffith proceeded to give the worst speech ever heard. Not just in content but in delivery. It was like watching a less sentient version of the PG Tips monkey. Constantly applauding himself and ending his sentences with “Yeah”. What was left of the audience didn’t know where to look.
If Andy really is the future chancellor, then we are truly fucked. Even Mel Stride wasn’t this hopeless. We might as well all pack up now. He was going to build more homes that were uninsulated and might fall down because they were cheaper. He would cut taxes and regulations the Tories had themselves introduced.
“This is our destiny,” he said. And then he dematerialised. It was as though he had been primitive AI and his controller had seen quite enough and decommissioned him. Andy didn’t know he had finished. And neither did anyone else.