End of the party - how British political leaders ran out of followers

If Cyril Northcote Parkinson was still around he would devise a law for party political conferences: that the significance of what is discussed in the conference centre is inversely proportional to the difficulty of getting in. Time was, when politicians stayed in shabby hotels in Blackpool and wandered along the seafront to the Winter Gardens to debate with constituency members, that conferences meant something. Over the next three weeks anyone visiting Glasgow, Manchester or Brighton, even if not involved in a party conference, will be inconvenienced by a security buffer which resembles the former green zone in Baghdad. But will anyone care what goes on inside?

Party conferences have become a misnomer. The last genuine conference was held about 20 years ago, since when the events have evolved into lobbyists’ trade shows. There will be no genuine conferring over policy. All that will happen is that ministers will make presentations of policies which have been conceived and honed by a small coterie of aides in London, and a very large number of lobbyists will compete for ministerial attention. The switch from seaside towns to large cities is indicative of the change: the latter have better restaurants, for the benefit of people on expense accounts.

Delegates will drown in saccharin as leaders pay tribute to the hard work of the envelope-stuffers who make the party tick. The BBC may even present the conferences as a meeting of the party faithful — but it will be a big lie. Neither Cameron, Miliband nor Clegg care one jot for their respective bands of swivel-eyed loons, whom party managers will do all they can to keep away from the podium — even if they are a little more subtle about it than the bull-necked bouncers who ejected 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang from Labour’s conference in 2005. The sheer cost of attending nowadays restricts it to those with a working interest in politics.