The first sign of trouble was the silence. Approaching the Conservative Party conference secure zone here in Manchester, I was amazed to be met by a complete lack of noise.
If you haven’t been to a party conference before, allow me to explain. To get into any major party’s gathering, and particularly the Conservatives’, attendees have to run a gauntlet of protesters and campaigners.
Some of these are quite good-natured, some are noisy and somewhat rowdy, while others can be downright aggressive. Over the dozens of party conferences I’ve had the pleasure to attend, I’ve seen it all. From good-natured campaigners dressed up as badgers (anti-cull) and bees (pro-biodiversity), to a small party of knights in full mediaeval plate armour (I still have no idea what that was about).
Whatever the character of the protest at hand, the protests themselves are an annual fixture. But not this year. On arriving on Sunday afternoon, I searched in vain for any crowds or noise, and found none at all. No drums, no flags, no megaphones. Not a sausage.
That’s a bad sign for the Conservative Party. It’s worse to be ignored than to be insulted. Even their worst critics seem to have decided they aren’t worth the trouble of shouting at. That points to the danger that the Conservatives are in. If everyone simply stops believing that you are relevant, then it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Last year’s conference was suffused with a certain demob-happy relief that even after a bad election, “We’re not dead”, as one prominent activist put it. But this year there’s a definite realisation that it’s possible to keep on falling.
A political party is a little like a religion. It requires people to believe in it for it to matter. Over a long and august history it might amass institutions, pomp and traditions, but these can easily become museum pieces if the idea underpinning it all ceases to be believable and believed.
There is no law requiring there to be a Conservative Party. Simply put, it must have confidence enough and press its case sufficiently hard that its relevance is undeniable, even to its opponents.
That, really, is the fundamental requirement of this week’s Tory conference. The members I’ve spoken to are concerned, but very open to being fired up for a fightback. They don’t want the most successful electoral force in Western history to sputter out with a whimper.
One thing they want to see is that their leadership has fire in its belly.
They chose Kemi Badenoch last year in part because she displayed punchy self-confidence that offered a tonic to a party beleaguered from the fag-end years of a long, attritional stretch in government.
The Tory grassroots want to see her in that combative form, leading from the front. Her conference-opening speech, in a packed auditorium, to the party’s elected volunteer officers showed that she gets that. Her formal leader’s speech on Wednesday is the next big test.
In addition to offering fire, she is also now providing policy red meat. New policies on leaving the ECHR and clamping down on illegal immigration are, we are told, just the start, with further announcements on economics and energy coming down the line.
Even before considering the merits of those positions, it’s notable that announcing them at all is a major shift.
Originally, the Conservatives’ plan was that they would not specify new policies for some years, following the approach of constructive vagueness that worked well for Labour as recently as the last parliament.
This has apparently been ditched – an implicit recognition that, while keeping your powder dry was canny in a two-party, red-blue political system, it’s unsustainable to leave a vacuum when there is a major insurgent challenger marauding through British politics.
Any airtime that the Tories don’t want, Nigel Farage will gladly fill. Privately, some MPs concede that deliberately leaving a policy vacuum was an unforced error which directly contributed to Reform’s reputation for growing momentum. The assumption that there was time to rebuild failed to take into account that the fundamentals of the political game have changed.
All that said, it would be a mistake to write off the Conservatives pre-emptively. Not least as they are rediscovering some of the old muscle memory of what it is to be an effective opposition.
The bringing down of Angela Rayner, for example, was a wholly CCHQ operation. It was researched, planned and deployed with timeliness and targeting that reminded me of their late-2000s campaigning peak.
The Conservative Party cannot take its future for granted. Its members and leaders know they have a hell of a battle on their hands, on two fronts. Like an old prize fighter, it may be battered and bruised, its opponents may smell blood, and its critics may be drafting its obituary. But it won’t quit.
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