Just another day in Crapland. It’s amazing what you can get used to. You can’t say the Tories haven’t put a lot of thought into their party conference. It takes some programming skill to make every day even more dismal than the last. You come expecting very little and get even less.
Schopenhauer would be in dreamland. The very act of being has never felt so inconsequential. Yet there’s something very comforting about this. You leave the Birmingham theme park attraction feeling better about yourself than when you arrived. Who knew abject failure could be so much fun? You find yourself congratulating some members on being able to dress themselves. A curious hybrid of an endangered species and care in the community?
You might find yourself wondering if you are being gaslit. Small pockets of people roaming around aimlessly with a smile on their face, insisting that it is very heaven in this dawn to be alive and repeatedly crossing themselves before images of the beatific Kemi Badenoch. But then you realise that the people the Tories are really gaslighting are themselves. It’s almost painful to watch. Almost. But mostly it’s like a remake of The Truman Show. Everyone waking up each day and believing they are engaged in something meaningful. When the reality is nothing is happening. They are living in a Potemkin village. A series of distractions designed to look like a party conference.
The breakout star is, of course, Kemi. She is the Tories’ chosen one. KULT KEMI. The leader who has rescued them from one black hole and is plunging them straight back into another. I’ve come to realise I’ve got Kemi wrong. Sure, she’s short-tempered and can’t tolerate dissent. But she’s actually a supremely gifted entertainer. A comedy genius. A woman whose one-liners often get mistaken for serious comment. A female Jack Dee. She would be far more successful taking her show to the Edinburgh fringe than Birmingham.
KULT KEMI: Badenoch badges on sale at the Tory conference. Photograph: James McCauley/Shutterstock
Kemi’s act on the morning media round was one of her best yet. No one does improv better. Understandably, every interviewer wanted to ask her about the Tories’ overnight announcement of a £10bn Iron Dome to rival the Israelis’ that would protect the UK from any kind of drone or missile attack. Like, how did she imagine she was going to build the Iron Dome for about a tenth of the money that all the experts said it would cost? And wasn’t this just some bullshit nonsense designed to make the front pages of the Tory press that wouldn’t stand contact with reality?
“Stop calling it an Iron Dome,” Kemi dead-panned. She really is a comedy pro. Even at 8.10am she’s still in role. “It isn’t an Iron Dome. I’ve never called it an Iron Dome. It’s a Britannia Shield.” Genius. She couldn’t think for the life of her why everyone was calling it an Iron Dome. Mmm. It might have been something to do with the Tory press office releasing a statement calling it an Iron Dome? And the opinion piece in the Sun, written by Kemi herself, calling it an Iron Dome? There are clearly a lot of replicant Kemis rushing around pretending to be the real one.
OK, OK, we’ll call it a Britannia Shield, said the radio and TV presenters. Sometimes it’s easier to humour a guest. So when was it going to be operational, what would it look like and how much of the UK would it cover? Kemi laughed. She hadn’t a clue. She was just the one with the ideas. The details she left for others. But it definitely would be up and running before Penny Mordaunt returned to parliament to reprise her role in Sky’s The War Game. As for the shield itself, that would be a few Sopwith Camel biplanes and barrage balloons that could be diverted to Scotland at a fortnight’s notice if required.
Are you really just a one-woman band? Anna Foster asked on the Today programme. Your personal polls are higher than your party’s. A polite way of saying the Tories are tanking in third place. Not at all, Kemi ad-libbed. Even Jeffrey Archer would have struggled to lie quite so shamelessly. Everyone knows who my shadow cabinet is. Er. I’m not sure I could name them all. I’m not even sure the shadow cabinet could. Just an array of nodding dogs on a dashboard. But maybe we’ve underestimated the public. They do know exactly who the shadow cabinet is. And that’s why the Tories are still bottom-lining.
Back in the conference centre, those members who were still alive were struggling to find something to do. The morning’s entertainment was centred around the “Main Hall”, AKA the converted cupboard. For Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, there were about 15 people in the room. The rest of the audience had disguised themselves as seats again. Still, not all bad news. Eight people were watching online. A figure that soon went down to one. For a while I wondered who this one poor sod was. Then I realised it was me.
Laura looked close to tears by the time the session was over. She was met beside the stage by someone who I hope was a therapist. Quite where everyone else had got to was a mystery. There was also no one to hear Rebecca Paul – me neither – talk about £50k handbags with a woman called Plum. Self-selecting, I guess. Maybe there’s a separate hall for those experiencing extreme catatonia.
By the afternoon we lucky few were stretched out into the much-reduced Symphony Hall to prepare for war with a Shahed drone hanging above our heads. First up was the shadow foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat, a man who has sold his one-nation soul for a job in Kemi’s Kabinet. “I am coming back to serve,” SuperTug announced, matching the oratory skills of Andrew Griffith. He is a man who wakes up every day, and seems disappointed not to find himself at war. He rather died on his arse.
Then we got the special guest. The rightwing historian Niall Ferguson. A more swivel-eyed, deranged Dr Strangelove. He had come to tell everyone that he too fancied a war, even if you didn’t want one. “A world war is coming,” he said, trying not to show if he had become sexually aroused. “And there is nothing we can do about it.” All of which made the later speeches of Kemi-come-latelies Helen Whately and James Cartlidge somewhat redundant. There’s no need to starve benefits claimants or build an Iron Dome when the apocalypse is upon us.
Suddenly the Tory conference made sense. It wasn’t just a place where hope came to die. It was a place where we all came to die.