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Saturday 22 November 2008

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore's Notebook

This is the last time, I hope, that I shall have to write from this dateline. Labour has cast off Blackpool, and the Conservatives say that this is their last conference here. I have always tried to resist the southern view that Blackpool sums up most of what is grisly in British culture, but I cannot honestly say that I expect ever to return. Now Roberts’s Oyster Rooms say ‘pizza’ in neon lights at their counter that once offered dressed crab. There is nothing to bring one back.

But Blackpool usually made the most exciting party conferences. The difficulty of getting there (you have to change trains from almost anywhere) meant that people came, stayed, plotted, argued and enjoyed themselves. In the days of easy security before the Brighton bomb of 1984, the public came and went freely. I was surprised, for example, to come across prostitutes in the bar of the Imperial Hotel, in innocent conversation with Robin Day. I also remember the extraordinary intensity of the hatred that Labour felt for us, the press, in the early 1980s. They put us in a pen and yelled abuse at our ‘disgusting and vicious smear campaigns’ (always the same phrase). Even more savage was the anti-Thatcher ‘right to work’ mob in 1981, which jostled us as I approached the Winter Gardens steering T.E. Utley, who was blind, on my arm. At Labour conferences, old trade unionists like Alex Kitson, sitting on the platform, would put down female speakers by calling them ‘lassie’ and ‘pet’ and telling them to draw their remarks to a close. Then there were the extraordinary speeches by Michael Foot as leader. Although Footie was said to be a great orator, these platform efforts were truly appalling. They were jerky, ill-prepared and rambling. Do I remember Mr Foot pulling a yellow cutting of a Times leader about India and the Bomb from his pocket and reading out large bits of it, for no apparent reason, or am I dreaming it? The vanity and sentimentality of the man!

In retrospect, one can see that the Blackpool conferences were exciting because they were still, until about 20 years ago, organised by people who did not think in terms of television. This meant that delegates crowded in in vast numbers, seeking experiences unavailable in their living rooms. The fanciful architecture of the Winter Gardens, filled to the rafters, imported amazing drama to everything. There was a huge amount of heat, very little light, and endless smoke — Tony Benn and Neil Kinnock with their pipes, Norman Willis with his stacked-up packets of cigarettes, Len Murray with his small cigars. This week, the way the seating is constructed in the hall artfully conceals that the numbers attending must be about a third of what they once were. Today, everything is more ‘user-friendly’, but there are very few users.

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