Despite well-meaning efforts by Francis Maude, Theresa May and Alan Duncan to cast a pall over the occasion, Blackpool 2005 turned out to be the most life-enhancing Tory party conference in recent years. With 6,000 members present, it provided a pleasing reminder that vigour and enthusiasm survive among the grass-roots. Meanwhile, a series of outstanding speeches from the platform demonstrates the remarkable depth of talent within the parliamentary party.
The first revelation was awesome: David Cameron. Every so often in British politics a star is born, and this happened last week. There has always been much to like about Cameron. But there was every reason to suppose that the same easy and plausible manner that has provided the impetus for his apparently effortless ascent through the foothills of Conservative party politics might in the long term prove an obstacle. Even admirers wondered whether the fashionable clique that has facilitated his rise would be utterly unable to sustain him once he reached the top.
In his dazzling campaign launch last week, and in his fine speech in Blackpool on Tuesday, Cameron demonstrated three qualities that I had never been sure he possessed: professionalism, commitment and moral seriousness. All politicians face one common and far from simple task: to become really substantial figures they must transcend their backgrounds and their immediate circumstances. David Cameron has achieved this. We now know, with reasonable certainty, that this most engaging and attractive figure will be a permanent fixture in the front rank of British politics for the next 25 years.
Nevertheless, Kenneth Clarke’s memorable speech on Tuesday afternoon was so much more formidable and accomplished, and a reminder of the distance that David Cameron still needs to travel. Clarke spoke to his audience much more clearly and directly, and it is instructive to compare the two orations. Cameron’s decision to speak without notes or any prompts was brave, and was indeed vindicated by a virtuoso performance. Still, at times I found myself covering my eyes out of sheer nervousness. Paradoxical though it sounds, Cameron gained virtuosity at the expense of spontaneity. I felt that he devoted so much energy to remembering his lines that he lost some of the passion and power of his delivery.
This explains why David Cameron made merely a very good, rather than an excellent, speech. Cameron impressed the party, but did not electrify it. Afterwards I discussed this with a columnist who has close links to the modernisers and who offered a different analysis. ‘David couldn’t make them really love him in the hall,’ the columnist noted. ‘You have to be racist or xenophobic to do that.’
The comment was wretched, because it completely failed to comprehend what motivates the admirable people in the conference hall. These attacks on the Tory party faithful display a regrettable failure of moral imagination amounting to something like blindness. I have studied them for years, these modest Tory activists who make the annual journey to the seaside party conferences. Unlike the politicians who strut their stuff, they do not go out of personal ambition, or for any kind of financial reward, or even the prospect of a good dinner. Something else drives them: duty, civic engagement and a sense of service.
In their towns and villages they are the ones who look after the elderly and encourage the young. They work for charities, do meals on wheels, run youth clubs. They are driven by a burning sense of the obligation which they owe their local community. They lack an abstract global vision, often symbolised by the wristbands metropolitan politicians wear to emphasise their caring side; they do good in a much more concrete and less ostentatious way. These obscure and deeply unfashionable folk are wholly incomprehensible to the metropolitan Tories and the London media classes who dominate the public agenda at Tory conferences. I noticed one ineffable example of this division during the lunchtime debate in the Winter Gardens ballroom on Tuesday. It was billed as an ‘interactive’ debate, giving ordinary party members the chance to question members of the shadow Cabinet.
One grass-roots Tory was called to ask a question from a podium in the back of the hall. It concerned health funding at a local level. The shadow Cabinet members briefly acknowledged the pertinent issue he raised, then relapsed into what was effectively a private discussion. Meanwhile the grass-roots Tory councillor Balwinder Singh Dhillon from Slough was left on his podium and given no chance to respond. Afterwards he told me that he was ‘left standing like an idiot’.
Both of the shadow Cabinet members on the platform — as it happens, David Cameron and Andrew Lansley — were modernisers who have been filling the airwaves with plangent calls for change. Both are adamant about the need to bring ethnic minorities into the Conservative party. Yet both — I am sure without meaning to — treated Councillor Dhillon with discourtesy. This is the weakness at the heart of the Tory modernisation project. They talk the language of change, but not much more. Tory MPs at Blackpool attacked their party for this; it ought to be the other way around. In the end it is the Tory activists who hold the clue to the party’s future, not the MPs with their directorships, safe seats in the Home Counties and agreeable pension arrangements. Only one politician in the Conservative party really understands this point, and he set out his vision very well on Monday afternoon in a fascinating speech. The task ahead, observed Iain Duncan Smith, ‘is not about changing the party to fit its public face, it’s about fitting the public face to what we really are’. The Tory party should glory in what it is, not try to deny it.
Next week the leadership contest withdraws from the clarity, light and vigour of Blackpool to the opacity of Westminster corridors and Pimlico drawing-rooms. An impartial observer, happily unaware of the torrid undercurrents of Conservative party politics, would naturally conclude that Clarke and Cameron should work together: the avuncular chairman and the dynamic chief executive. The favourite, David Davis, after his moderate speech on Wednesday morning, has suddenly acquired the air of the runner-up. He probably retains enough pledges to limp into the final stage of the contest, but may struggle to make an impression at the public hustings that will decide the winner.
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