The Spectator’s Notes | 9 October 2010

Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’.

Birmingham

Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. The Conservative party was a great tribe, authentically representing large swaths of British life. It was not very political, so on the rare occasions when it expressed real anxiety about something, you could tell it was serious. Political parties of this sort no longer exist and cannot be revived. Most people have better things to do. Party politics has undergone ‘producer capture’. The Conservative conference is therefore part media event put on by the leadership, and part surprisingly impressive gathering of experts, councillors, charities, lobby groups, companies, and now, Liberal Democratish think tanks too, all of whom actually know and care about policy (a subject which, in the old days, was never discussed). There is much to be said for this, but it does mean that the conference has ceased to be a means for the powerful to take the temperature. I have no idea what ‘the mood of conference’ is, and nor does anyone else.

Which means that the reaction to George Osborne’s idea of removing child benefit from top-rate taxpayers is difficult to gauge. Could it be, as the middle-class Tory newspapers hurried to suggest, that this reform is more than bourgeois flesh and blood can bear? Or is it a fair and logical saving which stops poor people paying tax for richer ones, and a clever way of chipping away at the expensive doctrine of the universal benefit? Although I enjoyed paying my child benefit straight into our high-interest bank account when our children were of the relevant age, I tend to the latter view.