What's the mood at Tory conference?

Tuesday

29 Sep 2015

Labour activists loved Jeremy Corbyn's speech. But will voters?

Jeremy Corbyn’s speech was excellent. It was passionate, full of campaigning zeal, focused on issues that the MP has campaigned on for years, and well-received in the hall. The new Labour leader came across as warm, principled, personable, fun. He was introduced in a lovely, low key fashion by a member of his own constituency party, whose own life story summed up his own values. He opened with jokes about the media claiming that he was keen for an asteroid to destroy the earth (more on this and his opposition to PIGEON BOMBS here), and these went down well – both amongst the activists and the media sitting in the

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: Jeremy Corbyn's conference speech

Jeremy Corbyn has just delivered his first conference speech as Labour leader. Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the address in this View from 22 special — looking at his delivery, the reaction in the hall, who it was meant to appeal to and whether it will change Corbyn’s standing with the general public. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below:

Steerpike

Chuka his toys out of the pram? Umunna misses Corbyn's speech

As Jeremy Corbyn made his speech to conference, Labour’s new frontbench did their best to put on a united front on the front row. As for the frontbenchers of Labour’s past? Well, it could hardly be described as a show of solidarity. Both Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt were nowhere to be seen at the speech, with ITV’s Chris Ship reporting that they had already left Brighton on a train: https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/648805512826503168 While Hunt did at least tweet supportive messages to Corbyn during the speech, Umunna has maintained a radio silence. On top of failing to show at the leader’s conference, the former shadow business secretary also cancelled an appearance at a fringe event today where he was due

The Spectator

Jeremy Corbyn's speech to Labour conference - full audio and full text

Jeremy Corbyn has just finished delivering his speech at Labour’s annual conference. The audio can be listened to here: Friends, thank you so much for that incredible welcome and Rohit, thank you so much for that incredible welcome. Rohit, thank you so much for the way you introduced me and the way our family and you have contributed so much to our community. That was absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much. I am truly delighted to be invited to make this speech today, because for the past two weeks, as you’ve probably known I’ve had a very easy, relaxing time. Hardly anything of any importance at all has happened to me.

Matthew Parris

What Corbyn - like Cameron - understands about the cold, dark heart of the British electorate

There’s a hard, hard mood out there among the public and I don’t think our newspapers get it at all. Could it be that the general populace are now more cynical than their journalists? At Tim Farron’s closing speech to his Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth last week, I sat through nearly an hour of one of the biggest cartloads of sanctimonious tosh it’s been my fate to endure in decades. And who do you suppose was lapping this up as avidly as any misty-eyed Lib Dem conference-goer? The hardened hacks, the sketchwriters, analysts and reporters. The press are old-fashioned: they love this emotional stuff. But the 21st-century public have

Alex Massie

Jocky Come Home: a Labour misery drama that will flop

Jeremy Corbyn is supposed to come to Scotland this week. Thursday’s visit will be his first since he became leader of the erstwhile people’s party. Then again, he’s been due to visit before only to find some better use of his time so who knows whether he can brave life beyond the wall this week? Yesterday John McDonnell, Jezzah’s vicar, used his speech to the Labour conference to plead with Scottish voters to “come home” to the party. It was past time, he suggested, that voters understood that the SNP are no kind of socialist revolutionaries. Which will not come as any great surprise to most Scots. That’s part of the

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech challenge

Jeremy Corbyn has, so far, had a reasonably good conference. Nothing has gone noticeably wrong. There have been no stand-up rows, no fights in the fringes, no heckling in the hall. And the atmosphere has been far better than Labour’s awful autumn conference last year, where everyone was full of gloom when the party was a few points ahead in the polls. But the Labour conference was still going to plan at this point last year, albeit in a moribund way. Ed Miliband hadn’t delivered his speech yet, and he therefore hadn’t forgotten to mention the deficit (the speech was poor, too, but the overall quality was quickly eclipsed by

Sebastian Payne

Lisa Nandy's workmanlike speech is indicative of Labour's talent problem

Lisa Nandy’s first conference speech as shadow energy and climate change secretary was solid and cordially received, if a little uninspiring. The MP for Wigan is one to watch in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet because she is frequently cited as a handover candidate — someone Corbyn could pass the leadership to before the 2020 election. Nandy’s announcement that Labour won’t seek to nationalise the Big Six energy companies is an example of how she is helping to detoxify Team Corbyn and assuage the fears of voters who think the new leadership is too left wing (it’s also yet another u-turn after Nato, Trident, EU membership): ‘Jeremy and I don’t want to nationalise energy. We want to do something

Isabel Hardman

Maria Eagle: I wouldn't have resigned over Trident vote

The Labour party may have avoided a divisive vote on Trident this week, but that doesn’t mean that it can always avoid working out whether it should have a new position. Last night Maria Eagle, the Shadow Defence Secretary, told a fringe that though she had made her mind in 2007 that she was in favour of the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, she wouldn’t have resigned had there been a vote that called for Trident to be scrapped at this conference. She said she’d reminded Corbyn when he offered her the job that she was pro-Trident, saying ‘I thought I need to make sure he remembers what my position

Isabel Hardman

Jeremy Corbyn: I love this country

A set of headlines about a political party leader declaring that he loves his country might, in less unsettled times, be considered a sign that news desks have given up and are going to report all instances of dogs biting men. But in the man-bites-dog-world in which Jeremy Corbyn has just been elected Labour leader and John McDonnell appointed his Shadow Chancellor, it’s news. It’s also the first set of reasonably good headlines for the new leader, which is in part because his media team is working much better with the media now. (though you can’t win ’em all) Corbyn is expected to say: ‘These values are what I was

Monday

28 Sep 2015

Isabel Hardman

Labour conference is surprisingly even-tempered. Why?

Why does Labour conference feel so even-tempered so far? In previous years the answer would be that it has been stage-managed to the hilt and all frontbenchers programmed with the lines to take. But this year the party’s conference strapline is ‘Straight talking. Honest politics’ and frontbenchers aren’t being sent daily lines to take, so even if they wanted to be on message, they couldn’t be. Of course, those frontbenchers are enjoying telling fringes that they take one view while their leader takes another, but what’s still remarkable about this conference is how good natured all the fringe meetings have been after a vicious leadership contest. Those running were abused

Steerpike

Date night dinner for Jeremy and John

The New Statesman holds the best party of the Labour conference – but Chuka Umunna was the guest of honour and no sign of the leader. Where was Jeremy Corbyn? Toasting his success with his new comrades? Striking a new alliance with the editor of the Daily Mirror? Mr S understands that the Labour leader shunned the more glitzy parties on offer at his first conference as leader in favour of a quiet meal with his friends at Jamie’s Italian. Corbyn was joined for his Italian dinner by John McDonnell and a couple of close aides. With no flunkies or security guards in sight, the group feasted on pizza and tap water

Fraser Nelson

John McDonnell’s speech gave a taste of the madness that has taken over the Labour party

The new shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, told us to expect him to sound like a mild bank manager when he gave his speech today. He ended up sounding like he was auditioning for the remake of Citizen Smith. How many bank managers end their speech by actually scripting a Wolfie-style yawp of ‘Solidarity!’? Perhaps this is all mild and relatively sane by McDonnell’s standards: if so, it offers us an interesting glimpse of the madness which now has the Labour party in its grip. His speech was supposed to be all nuance, policy reviews and open debate but strip that away and you’re left with some of the most deranged,

Steerpike

Ed Miliband's spin doctor makes a return to the Labour press office

After Labour’s disastrous election result, Ed Miliband’s spin doctor Tom Baldwin made a swift exit from Labour HQ. For many in the party this was a welcome move; the king of spin was blamed for a number of election gaffes, including allegedly telling the BBC’s Nick Robinson that Miliband saw the HSBC scandal as ‘another Milly Dowler moment’. Despite this, it appears that old habits die hard. Steerpike understands that Baldwin has been spied in the the press office at Labour party conference. Is the spinner making a return to party politics? Given that Baldwin not only has feuds with journalists on a number of nationals, but also wrote a post-election editorial accusing the BBC of showing bias against

The Spectator

John McDonnell's speech to the Labour party conference - full text

I warn you this is not my usual rant, they get me into trouble and I’ve promised Jeremy to behave myself. Jeremy and I sat down at the beginning of his campaign for the Labour leadership to discuss what they call the strap line for his campaign leaflets and posters. We came up with the strapline you see now. Straight talking, honest politics. It just embodied for me what Jeremy Corbyn is all about. So in the spirit of straight talking, honest politics. Here’s some straight talking. At the heart of Jeremy’s campaign, upon which he received such a huge mandate, was the rejection of austerity politics. But austerity is

Rod Liddle

If only middle-class liberals would shut up, we might get a proper debate

Why are the audiences for political debate programmes so unrepresentative of the voting population? By which I mean, why are they seemingly always stuffed to the gills with Corbynista maniacs? On Any Questions? and Question Time, the best way to get a loud cheer from the crowd is to suggest we should decapitate the Queen, or invade Israel. Is this because of BBC bias? Two contrasting views in the papers these last few days. One from the right-wing journo Allison Pearson, who had to suffer a ‘leftie hell’ on Any Questions?, and who wants the BBC to make a better effort to balance the audiences. And one from media consultant

Steerpike

Ghosts of Labour's past at New Statesman conference bash

As Labour conference kicked off on Sunday on Brighton pier, it was a case of the ghosts of Labour’s past at the annual New Statesman party. The magazine’s editor Jason Cowley told attendees who had their journeys affected by train works not to worry as ‘Corbyn has a plan for the railways’, before reflecting on what had happened to the party in the space of a year. ‘At our party last year in Manchester Ed Miliband was standing beside me and I introduced him as our next Prime Minister,’ he told partygoers at Brighton’s Al Fresco restaurant. While Miliband stayed away this time, the party’s new leader was also notably absent. With Lucy Powell locked deep in conversation with her

Sunday

27 Sep 2015

Fraser Nelson

Stiglitz, Piketty - Jeremy Corbyn’s star ‘advisers’ are, like him, wrong about UK inequality

A new leader with little credibility asks famous economists to ‘advise’ him on economic policy. It’s an old trick. News that Jeremy Corbyn is seeking the counsel of Thomas Piketty and Joe Stiglitz is not surprising – both are in the business of selling books suggesting the world is becoming more unequal than ever, and that a crisis is looming. The problem is that this ain’t so – not in Britain, at any rate. Piketty’s central thesis was brilliantly dismantled by Chris Giles, the FT’s economics editor, who won an award for his expose. But at least Piketty published data that could be scrutinised: Stiglitz seems to make his up on

Isabel Hardman

No Trident vote will calm Labour conference tensions

In the past few minutes, the Labour conference arrangements committee has decided not to hold a vote on whether to scrap Trident. This prevents a major split in the party early on into Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. There was insufficient support from constituency party delegates for a debate and vote, and even though Corbyn was making a concerted effort to argue that it didn’t matter if there was a difference of opinion in the party, this is one matter that a number of MPs and members feel strongly is a part of the party’s identity. It does mean that this conference will have a little less tension around it. But it’s

Sebastian Payne

In photos: the Corbynisation of Labour conference

The main halls and speeches at party conferences tend to be the least interesting parts — the words are briefed out to the press in advance, what politicians say is on stage is usually dull and you can watch it all on TV anyway. It’s the fringe events and exhibitions that give a better sense of a party’s mood. Judging by the halls of the Brighton Centre, Jeremy Corbyn has certainly had an impact on the whole party (click on the pictures to enlarge). Wandering through the exhibition halls, I was struck just how many trade unions are present have big flashy stands. Unite the Union has is easily the most