The voice of Keir Starmer echoed round the Conservative party’s conference hall. ‘Free of charge digital ID’ chanted the disembodied Dalek. If people had come hoping to escape the Grand Adenoid then hard luck. Kemi Badenoch’s welcome address to the Tory faithful began with a dystopian video compilation of some of the Labour government’s ‘greatest hits’ since entering office; channel crossings up, gangs distinctly un-smashed. A useful reminder that, whatever D:Ream might have promised us, things can always get worse.
The feeling at this conference is like a family gathered round a bedside awaiting an imminent demise. Even the tat in the conference overspill is macabre: a stall offers paintings of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick which look like they have been painted as part of a therapy session for high-security mental patients.
Badenoch began her speech with a paean to the city. ‘The Conservative party loves Manchester,’ she beamed. There is not a single Conservative seat left in Greater Manchester and, in many Labour seats, Reform is the closest opposition. If the Conservative party really does love Manchester then it is love unrequited.
She went on to address the elephant in the room, or rather why there was room for an elephant in the conference hall with all the empty seats. ‘Last year the public sent us a clear message, one we could not mistake’, and probably one that can’t be repeated in polite conversation.
But don’t worry, Badenoch had a plan. ‘In the last 12 months we’ve started doing politics in a new way,’ she said. Well that’s one way of putting it. ‘In the last two hours and 40 minutes we’ve started doing Transatlantic crossings in a new way’, said Captain Smith, from somewhere near the ocean’s floor.
It was a strange speech, not bad in content, punchy at times – all the right noises on the economy, anti-Semitism, migration. But it did feel a little muted. I was put in mind of the regular cast reunions of long-running sitcoms, where fewer and fewer members are still alive. There’s a sort of necessarily ominous and faintly tragic air to them. Stars of previous seasons were honoured too; two of the bigger cheers of the afternoon came when the leader of the opposition either invoked or directly quoted Margaret Thatcher. Here it was, the latter days of the world’s oldest political party panning out like a cast reunion of ‘Allo ‘Allo.
Chris Philip tried to inject some energy into proceedings by doing a sort of weird bobbing routine on stage as he talked about how he’d deport foreign criminals if he were home secretary. It was all a bit ‘Make a Wish Foundation’. We’d moved from ‘Allo ‘Allo to Only Fools and Horses – except ‘this time next year we’ll be millionaires’ wasn’t actually an event with a statistically zero chance of happening. Everyone clapped when they were supposed to, nobody heckled or booed. But then people do tend to be well behaved at funerals.
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