Nigel Farage has now arrived at the Ukip conference. He strode through the bar area, followed by an entourage larger than the one that accompanies the Prime Minister. Delegates clapped as he passed them. He will be speaking shortly, and it does feel as though he’s got rather a task.
The mood of the conference so far has not been anywhere near as jubilant as the mood at the party’s autumn conference, which was consistently ecstatic, even before Mark Reckless appeared on stage right at the end to announce he was defecting. The speeches so far have not been any better or worse than last year, and the election is closer, so there’s no particular reason for a less jubilant reception. But even the excited ovations are less frequent, the cheering rather more punctilious and the general atmosphere just a little calmer. Even the music between speeches, which is the sort of thing you’d expect to hear during the painful bit of a spinning class, isn’t stirring them as much as before. Of course, the mood here is still better than the manufactured, soundbite-riddled manner in which the main party conferences proceed. But Farage does need to stir up the troops a little more in his speech, otherwise the People’s Army may appear as though it’s not marching with great fervour towards the General Election.
One of the reasons, I suspect, is that the party is working very hard in the seats it is trying to win and that activists may be more fatigued by the reality of election campaigning than they have been before. Another is that Farage has been elsewhere. And perhaps another is that the party hasn’t presented its manifesto as was previously planned. Suzanne Evans, upon taking over the manifesto job, said ‘I relish the task of putting together the final details and presenting a sensible, radical and fully costed manifesto at our spring conference in Margate’. But today she didn’t present it, and it is now due after the Budget. Perhaps the Ukippers feel as though they’ve heard much of what has been said before and are keen for a bit more meat to take onto the doorsteps. Another reason may well be that Ukippers were on an impossibly unsustainable high at their autumn conference, given Douglas Carswell’s surprise defection. We’ll see how they respond to Farage.
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