On Sunday afternoon I arrived in Liverpool, and amazingly they let me in! This is the 20th Labour Party conference I have attended. I first started going in 1998 when Politico’s started running the bookshop at all three party conferences. Next week it will be my 38th Conservative conference. I’ve also been to 10 Libdem conferences. That means, if you include prep and travel I have spent more or less a whole year of my life attending party conferences. Does that meet the definition of being a total sad bastard. Each year, I think to myself ‘this will be my last’, but so far it never has been.
Party conferences have changed hugely over the years. As they’ve transformed from genuine conferences into rallies or conventions, the sense of occasion and the sense that you’re participating, whether as a delegate or media representative, in something important, has gradually diminished. The events now exist for parties to make money and to showcase the supposed brilliance of the party and its top team. Ordinary party members are almost there under sufferance. The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties to offer genuine policy debate. I hope whoever is elected leader for the Tories will order CCHQ to bring back meaningful policy debate. It was how I cut my political teeth in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would put my speaker slip in hoping to be called and on several nerve-wracking occasions I was. I remember making a speech on acid rain, with Margaret Thatcher looking down on my from the podium.
But it’s the fringe where the most interesting action is. I remember that every year I would go to the Selsdon Group fringe meeting to get my annual injection of conservative philosophy from Dr Rhodes Boyson. There was such a buzz about many of the fringe meetings.
I remember going to my first Labour conference at the beginning of the Blair years and observing all the young men in sharp suits rushing around with a sense of self importance and thinking that it reminded me of a Tory conference in Margaret Thatcher’s day. It’s a bit like that at Labour conferences nowadays. It certainly wasn’t in the Corbyn years.
I’ll be broadcasting my radio show from the conferences on the Monday and Tuesday of each one. I always enjoy outside broadcasts, even when the parties seem reluctant to put up good guests. I have high hopes for this year, but we’ll see!