Manchester
‘Beer-battered sustainable fish’, said the menu in the Palace Hotel: this great city tries to combine its incontestable northernness with its growing, but still insecure modernity. Everything has to be ‘sustainable’ now of course, which will prove difficult if the present European banking system cannot be sustained. The government’s new ideas about planning are based on ‘sustainable development’. Even though I find the phrase irritating and almost otiose (it is like saying one is in favour of ‘edible food’), I speak at the Daily Telegraph fringe meeting in favour of the new policy. Only in Britain — only, actually, in England — do people believe they are doing country life a good turn by refusing to build houses for the next generation to inhabit. It is a more powerful attack on rural culture and the rural poor than were the Highland Clearances. So it is puzzling to be opposed at the meeting by figures with a left-wing background — Shaun Spiers of the CPRE and Dame Fiona Reynolds of the National Trust. In the past, this subject has always been one where Tory MPs, bullied by the ‘haves’ in their southern rural constituency associations, have been frightened of supporting greater freedom to build, so I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the audience. Almost everyone who asked a question had actually dealt with planning issues, usually as councillors, and almost all resented the slowness, cost and unanswerability of the present system. Oliver Letwin, my fellow panellist on the pro- side, almost made us weep with his moving tale of how the villagers of Buckland Newton in his constituency, having opposed new development vehemently, finally built beautifully from their own plan. At the end of the meeting, Fiona Reynolds presented Letwin with an enormous basket of National Trust produce (and me with a bar of fudge). Was this an admission of defeat or an inducement which — if given him by a developer — would have had him out of office?
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Giving dinner to Letwin, I ask him to meet me at a restaurant called Bank, which I remember vaguely from a previous visit. He rings me from outside its door to say that Bank is a pub, not a restaurant. He has rather brilliantly worked out that when I said Bank, I must have meant Stock, a restaurant sited in the former Stock Exchange. In the end, we go to a very good place called Gaucho, whose mother country returned to prosperity after defaulting.
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Getting to Manchester wasn’t easy. I had bought a return ticket in Sussex for £80, but at Euston, a man who claimed complete knowledge of the fare system explained that, because I was travelling unaccompanied and aged 54 after Michaelmas (or some such regulation) I must pay him another £134.80 for a single. When I reached my hotel, I tried to open the window. It was locked, so I rang reception. They could not open it, they said — ‘health and safety’. I replied that I had a health and safety ‘issue’ because I could not breathe at night in air-conditioning. I offered to break the window if necessary. ‘Hold on, I’ll get the manager.’ The manager said that they could not open the window because ‘It’s a listed building’. I pointed out that, when built, the listed building had windows which were designed to open. The manager came upstairs and explained that only the engineer could open the window and he had gone home. I asked him to ring the engineer, which he did. Then he disappeared for five minutes and returned with a large box of tools including a window key. I threw up the sash, and took great gulps of beer-battered, unlisted, Mancunian air.
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Beer-battered Tory delegates, not looking very sustainable, are to be seen on the streets of Manchester at night, but party conferences now have little to do with their party members. It is said that, of the 11,000 people present, only about 4,000 are actually from the constituencies, the rest being the great caravan of hucksters, hacks and lobbyists which now follows power. It is an unexpected feature of politics in a supposedly egalitarian age that the rank and file now matter so little. The conference was started by the National Union in the late 19th century, and permitted the party leaders to attend only as guests: it was the authentic voice of the parishioners, you might say, rather than the bishops. Today, that is reversed. In the Midland Hotel, I bump into Lord Ashcroft, attending for the first time in many years without any official position. He explains that money comes into it. Until quite recently, the party made a loss of about £750,000 on the party conference, but now, with the high prices exacted from the media and lobbyists, and deals done with hotels etc to get a share of bar takings, it makes a profit of £1.5 million. Constituency representatives pay lower rates than anyone else, so their presence is not welcome.
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As a result, there isn’t much atmosphere. In the huge hall, stewards almost force us near the stage so that the cameras don’t see the empty seats. I sit with Andrew Gimson, the Telegraph’s brilliant sketch-writer, because he is Boris Johnson’s Boswell, and I want his analysis of the Mayor’s speech. The former editor of this paper strides in. Although I must admit that I harbour occasional, conventional doubts about Boris’s suitability for high office, this performance is very persuasive. Only Boris could fill a speech with words like ‘hobbits’, ‘roseate’, ‘rhubarb-rubbers’, ‘the burghers of Calais’ and dare to launch an attack on Mahatma Gandhi, all in the course of trying to prove that he is doing such a marvellous job as Mayor. Boris’s gift for fantasy and imagination is a key political strength and, in current conditions, a unique one. Gimson, however, looks grave as the ovation draws to its close. The speech was ‘distressingly mature’, he judges, failing to launch any cheap attacks on David Cameron. Later, though, in a fringe meeting, Johnson stirs up trouble by appearing to support an EU referendum. Gimson emails me: ‘B has gone off message. No longer so disconcerting.’
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