Wikipedia says the annual Labour Conference is “formally the supreme decision-making body” of the governing party of the United Kingdom. Which is sort of true. Unlike the Conservative party conference — a largely champagne soaked talking shop — Labour’s yearly jamboree does have binding political consequences in the form of various resolutions voted on by hundreds of elected party delegates and affiliates from across the nation. Party democracy is nowhere near as powerful as it once was, but there is a justifiable purpose to funnelling thousands of people into an expensively policed few square kilometres of a provincial city for a few days every year.
But for many of the thousands of people who attend — party members, journalists, senior politicians, lobbyists, PR types, etcetera — many not casting a single vote in the conference hall, Labour conference is also a sort of social bedlam, an intense and energy sapping whirlwind of nods and winks and meetings and chats and interviews and jokes and parties and drinks and cadged-cigarettes and regrets and hangovers. This quickly becomes apparent when, as an observer, one attempts to knock it into any sort of coherent narrative shape, ex post facto.
