I’d gone to the Tory conference in Birmingham with a brief to ask those who voted for our new prime minister, that self-selecting 0.06% of the population, whether they were already feeling buyer’s remorse. Conservative foot soldiers and doorsteppers like to think of themselves as a loyal bunch, at least when it comes to the annual jamboree. Still, there weren’t many within the fortified ring of the conference centre who would even own up to having supported Truss. A few insisted: “It’s still her honeymoon.” How we laughed. As honeymoons go, this one was right up there with the worst wet weekend in Rhyl. John Ruskin’s classic nuptial getaway, in which he supposedly never recovered from the shock of discovering that his new bride had pubic hair, came to mind.
Conservative party members are never slow to voice a belief that things aren’t what they used to be. Some of those older party stalwarts in the bars and cafes of the conference halls were facing a reality that the upper reaches of their tribe had been hollowed out, not just of dissenting voices, but also of sentient life.
Most were putting a braveish face on it. Pam Tracey, a Gloucester city councillor for 30 years, had cheerful recollections of jam and Jerusalem times when everyone pulled together. “Fundraising, ladies’ lunches, everyone getting on, that’s what it’s all about. Certainly,” she conceded, “this is one of the more sober conferences. But, as they say, the prime minister hasn’t had time to put her lipstick on yet and I don’t know half these young lads and girls in the cabinet. I’d still like to see Boris in. I think he will come back, God bless him. But he deserves a couple of quiet years with his wife. That poor man got us out of the pandemic, he went through the whole experience, he was in hospital. He wasn’t prime minister as such,” she suggests, warming to the memory, “he was more of a Mother Teresa figure…”
Vanessa Churchman, 81, ran a coach company in London for 20 years before becoming a councillor on the Isle of Wight. She still runs to keep fit. “I come here as ever to learn, to go to the fringe events,” she says. “I voted for Rishi Sunak. I felt we needed a real specialist economist in charge. I didn’t get my choice, but tough. I’ll support her. That’s democracy. But the fact is we lack a really charismatic leader. Where is our next William Hague?”
Where indeed. A few veterans were suitably embarrassed by the first few weeks. One man from Oxford, at his 40th conference, tells me that the system that allows Tory members to choose the next PM “has to be taken away from us, because we can’t be trusted to get the best person”. He then hurriedly withholds his name, for fear of reprisals. “There are too few of us to make that big a decision,” he whispers to me. You have a sense that such members hardly recognise the party in front of them, shorn first of remainers – David Gauke and Michael Heseltine were exiled to fringe events up the road – and now the likes of Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the sort of dangerous “wets” who believe that budgets must be costed.
Dr Vivek Kaul, an NHS surgeon currently on sabbatical who joined the party in 2019, is struck by the strange desiccation of the conference, his first. “It’s true,” he says, “that she has only really been in office for two weeks. Give her time, the jury is still out, and all that. But the mood is: things are fine! The fact that they are now 30 points behind in the opinion polls hardly gets a mention. The worst thing for this government is that their critics have not turned up. You know when Napoleon went to Moscow and the Russians had withdrawn and there was no one there to fight? He waited two months and first his horses died of cold and then his men. For me,” he says, “it feels a bit like that.”
The doctor’s diagnosis was right, to a degree. But however small you make a political tent – it was standing room only for the pinstripe headbangers in the Institute of Economic Affairs mini-marquee – however much you seal yourself off from reality, there are always a few troublemakers who ruin it for everybody. In this case, the renegades included the currency and gilts traders of the City of London and Michael Gove. The much-defenestrated minister did not hold up a Greenpeace banner saying “Who voted for this?” last Sunday, but he might as well have done. As ever, Gove was barely able to contain the am-dram thrill of his pantomime villainy. Having appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC sofa to openly dismantle his government’s key policies, he repeated the act to the faithful:
Is the party imploding? he was asked.
No! he cried with stagey fervour.
Are you the rebel leader?
I’m just a backbencher!
He was followed on that opening day podium by Jake Berry, the 12th Tory party chairman in 13 years and the sixth since Brandon Lewis in 2019. Berry has the look of a Premier League manager who knows that he’ll at least get a big payday if results don’t go his way and he’s out by Christmas. The MP describes himself as “the first blue brick in the red wall” and is quickly into his stride, laying out the big intellectual themes of the conference as he sees them.
This of course means a good deal of talk about cakes and pies, as if the economy could be best understood as a ginormous Greggs. The previous prime minister’s take on cake – “though Boris can hold his head high” – was no longer a reference point. Now it was all about expanding the cake, growing the pie. In relation to these observations Berry offered a curious line that I heard him say twice more as the week ground on. “It’s not some economics essay,” he boasted. “I didn’t take economics A-level.” That’s the kind of talk that always reassures the markets. “The Conservative government has to be competent,” Berry said, while from outside the tent the repetitive strains of the Benny Hill theme, Yakety Sax, amplified through the speakers of the protester Steve Bray, provided a soundtrack.
The further you walked away from the gated village of the conference – for personal safety reasons delegates had been requested to not show their accreditation passes beyond the guarded area, though you could spot their shiny shoes a mile off – the more divorced from the world around it seemed. I was staying that first night in my native city in a pub in Digbeth a mile out of the centre, but a million miles from internecine squabbles about the priority of cutting top rates of tax. At the Old Crown – supposedly the oldest building in Birmingham, £40 quid a night - I listened to the soundtrack of 1980s hits from the bar downstairs while trying to find a particular quote in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, his account of covering the Nixon election of 1972. While I was thumbing through that book a series of alerts appeared on my phone from the boozy parties at the Hyatt hotel; the first suggesting that the prime minister was doubling down on her chancellor’s 45p tax policy, and then that she wasn’t. I eventually found the quote I was looking for: “With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.”
The following morning, the joke was that the fringe meeting on U-turns had been cancelled. I wandered into a session led by the American pollster and strategist Frank Luntz, guru to successive Republican party leaders, on how the Tories might change their language to win the next election. Luntz, a chunky, bearded man with a huckster’s baritone, is all about language. He barked an opening demand for any journalist to get out of the room, now, but since this was a session on semantics and I’ve always considered myself more a warrior poet, I figured it was OK to stay. What followed was an interesting exercise in political presentation.
“Life is tough now. Be prepared for it to be even tougher in 2023,” his first slide stated. Activists sitting cross-legged on the floor in the “Thatcher theatre” took notes.
Luntz had them write down three words on a piece of paper: “supply-side economics”. And then he told them to cross them out. “Because I never want any one of you to say those words. Ever. Again. Because no one knows what they mean.”
He briefly flashed up a slide on a screen and told no one to photograph it: “Protecting the poorest, the weakest and most vulnerable is what people want most from government but that is not part of the current Tory message,” it read. And “Rising prices are the single greatest daily threat. If life becomes less affordable your majority will become less stable.” And “Tory voters still prioritise immigration control, floating voters don’t”.
Luntz talks in a guttural stream of consciousness, grunting the kind of questions that most of us might have been lately shouting at the radio: “Why are you appealing to bankers and not ordinary people?” he wonders aloud. He has people stand up in order to tell them they look too much like politicians.
“This room is not representative of what’s happening out there,” he says of the world beyond the Thatcher theatre. I write down: no shit, Sherlock. “In the past year a third of this country has had to return an item to the shelves at checkout because they can’t afford it. The same number has decided not to fill their car with gas. You need to reflect their struggles!”
Luntz won’t take questions about policy – only language. Asked about “wokeness”, he says: “Campaigning on it may get you elected, but you will hate the country you have to govern.”
“Imagine” is the word he would have the prime minister utter to open her speech, “the most powerful word in the language”. He leaves his audience to ponder the very long pause that might follow it.
There is nothing in what he says that strikes me as anything other than obvious: use photographs that show you engaging with people, not staring into space. Tell stories about people, not about numbers. It’s only when I subsequently sit and watch the new cabinet deliver its speeches that I realise how much, in these environs, Luntz’s theories might seem like hidden treasure.
The main speakers have, unusually, been consigned every day to slots between 4pm and 6pm on the main stage, graveyard timing built in. One theory is that they don’t want to spook the stock markets. One after the other they file on stage to make a mockery of Luntz’s principles. Thérèse Coffey has inherited a health department that has just guided the nation through the worst public health crisis in a century. You’d think there might be some heroic, heartwarming stories to be told. Instead, she talks her audience through the nursery school ABCD of her priorities: (ambulances, backlog, care, doctors and dentists) and outlines the difficulty of her plan to have people get a doctor’s appointment within two weeks. (Every time she says that, it’s worth holding in mind that the equivalent ambition for the last Labour government in 2010 was two days.)
The new, grinning environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, then wagged a finger in the air and apparently set out to reassure conference that he was on top of the water companies’ shitshow because he ran a recycling initiative at Hook infant school as a child. He had called the multimillionaire bosses of the water monopolies into his office, on his first day, to talk turds, and given them their report cards: “Not good enough!” He wagged his finger again and announced a regime of higher fines to be passed on to consumers. The transport secretary subsequently appeared to talk about filling 10m potholes.
Is there a factual version of being triggered? If so, almost every sentence uttered from the main stage seemed to me to require a footnoted primal scream involving Brexit and the fact that they had already been in charge for 12 whole years. There was a moment in Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech when he half misspoke and referred to the catastrophic mini-budget as happening 10 years ago rather than 10 days ago. It sounded not so much like wishful thinking as a sort of private war on past mistakes. Irony then died again when the man who had so lately singlehandedly spooked global markets uttered his adherence to “ironclad fiscal discipline” and was greeted with unhinged applause.
Several of these speeches, including Kwarteng’s, linked their talking points about red-tape bonfires and unleashed capitalism to the native Birmingham spirit of Joseph Chamberlain. It seemed a measure of their war on memory that no one seemed to know or care that Chamberlain, arguably the most effective deliverer in British political history, transformed the streets and squares in which this conference was taking place by taking water and gas into public control and clearing slums to create Corporation Street.
I dug out an underlined passage in Richard Vinen’s recent, brilliant history of my home city, a contemporary report on Chamberlain’s three years in the mayoral office: “All that was wanting is now provided: public buildings, parks… baths, libraries, education institutions, the streets are perfectly kept, and well lighted… the sewage no longer pollutes the streams but is employed to fertilise the land. The gas, cheapened to the lowest point, is in the hands of the Corporation and the water supply is constant and unrestricted, alike to the poorest and to the wealthiest in the town.” Imagine.
One name that in my interminable hours in conference halls and fringe tents I never once heard mentioned was that of David Cameron. A few people outside the halls recalled him, though. They were a reminder that before culture wars and Brexit, this party came to power a dozen years ago talking about inclusivity and the “big society” and the urgent need to create a “wellbeing index” to “measure our progress as a country not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving”.
You run into one or two relics of that kinder party, ignoring the evidence in front of them, keeping the faith. Tom Hulme is from Manchester, lives in Lincoln and works in further education. He is wearing a fabulous frock. On the LGBTQ+ spectrum, Hulme says: “I need to add an extra T for Tom.”
What does Hulme make of the party’s “war on woke”? “It’s people who are angry looking for something to be angry about. I feel like we have imported the wrong bit of American politics that pits people against each other and creates divisions where they don’t exist. I think it’s a dangerous place to be.”
How does it feel to have a leader who made a virtue of that in her campaigning? “I think that they fell into the trap of listening to a very small number of people with a very loud voice. I don’t think it is what the general public want to hear about. Just because you are trans or gay or whatever, you still have bills to pay.”
Richard Semitego, a director of the Africa House trade organisation, is a former chairman of Barking and Dagenham Tories and a veteran constituency agent. This conference, he says, “is totally different compared to others. Very quiet.”
I ask him how he thinks global Britain is doing. “Getting out of the EU was disastrous,” he says. “I’ve asked ministers, why when you talk about Commonwealth trade, do you only talk about Canada, Australia, New Zealand never African countries?” He’s just returned from a trade mission to Rwanda. How about the deportation policy? “I am totally against it, it won’t work for a start, but it’s just a scarecrow that they can talk about.”
Is he finding many like-minded people here? “Remainers have been quiet, but the force is growing there. I have spoken to a few people who have told me privately that they made a mistake,” he says.
Mea culpas are generally thin on the ground. I go in search of people who have made them and lived to tell the tale. Paul Bettison OBE tells me he is the “longest-serving top-tier council leader in the country”. He’s served in Bracknell for 28 years. How many U-turns has he made? “There have been three times in that time when I’ve had to go to the electorate and say, look we got this wrong, I’m changing it. Over 28 years they have just about forgiven me.”
I’m guessing, I say, that none of those U-turns involved your first major decision and required the Bank of England to use £65bn to stabilise the trillion-dollar pension markets. “Probably not, no,” he concedes.
In the absence of ideas and empathy, Tory ministers fall back on their hits. The only standing ovation given with any genuine fervour goes to Suella Braverman, who delivered a speech that borrowed all the tropes that Nigel Farage used to provide with far greater gusto in his never-ending Ukip tour of town halls. Her “people tales” centred on Albanian rapists and the wave of asylum seekers claiming they were modern slaves. Her own political dream is to see the first planes jetting off from Britain to Kigali packed with desperate refugees. Imagine.
Jeremy Burnett Rae, a lawyer and former chair of the Tory Reform Group, tells me jovially that the new home secretary should have received more than one standing ovation for her ambitions. “What’s a woman got to do?” he asks. “People in this country are entirely fed up with two things: lawyers and small boats.” He speaks, he says, as an expert. He’s a barrister and a member of the Royal Ocean Sailing Club. “Although,” he says, as a clincher, “I don’t believe in motorised rubber dinghies. I believe in things with floppy sails.”
The problem with formulaic responses is the more often you trot them out the less sincere they sound. The prime minister and the chancellor are still in lockstep, we gather, from her skittish endorsement of her Greenwich and Downing St neighbour on the conference stage. To prove the point she uses the same words he does, like some weird U-turn incantation: “I get it and I have listened.”
By the final day, there are some tooth-grindingly awful takes on the lamest lines. Endless “delivery, delivery, delivery” gags arrive without any of that trio. “Margaret Thatcher was famous for saying no no no,” Berry announces in introducing his leader. “Watch out Sir Humphrey! You’ve just got the yes yes yes prime minister!”
Many of the diehards, pre-empting the rail strikes, had by then skedaddled home. Local Tory members had apparently been encouraged to swell the numbers in the main hall, so the atmosphere for the prime minister’s inaugural speech had a vaguely conscripted feel. Still, as she got into her stride about the “anti-growth coalition” – which appeared to include all Britain’s public service workers, any trade union member, anyone on welfare or concerned about the environment, most of the cabinet members she’d been working with for the last decade and a few of whom she had just appointed – she semi-roused the faithful to standing ovations. As she ran through another of her zingers – “growth, growth, growth” – I wrote three words of my own in my notebook: “Make it stop.”
