I am sitting writing this in a corner of the Birmingham ICC, a conference centre and concert venue as though designed by Max Escher with a confusing array of staircases going everywhere and nowhere, it seems. But that is not what strikes me as odd. More, I am struck by this being the weirdest Conservative Party Conference I have ever attended — and the first one I went to was when Margaret Thatcher was still PM, a full nine prime ministers ago. And although it is always tempting to compare the Tories to the Repubican Party — and Labour to the Democrats — they couldn’t be more different.
Let’s just stay for a moment with events here in Birmingham. There is no set piece leader’s speech, because the leader — Rishi Sunak — is standing down, and he doesn’t want to give one. He made a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance, before going on to open a bakery in Sutton Coldfield — oh how the mighty have fallen.
And the mood I expected to find of anguished despair among Conservatives after July’s calamitous kick in the cobblers from British voters is not to be found. Everyone seems to be having the time of their lives. The worst election defeat in the party’s history, and people are partying.
It’s almost as though after 14 years of the wearying and draining responsibility of government there is fun to be had in the easiness of opposition. It’s navel gazing a- go-go. The leadership hopefuls are on an endless round of debates, speeches, media interviews, handshakes and beaming smiles frozen in place — and talking excitedly about how the party HQ needs an overhaul.
But what is there to celebrate? In essence, this conference is about the four people auditioning to take on that most poisoned chalice of political jobs, leader of the Opposition.
Rudderless and leaderless
All of which is a long way of saying the party for the moment is leaderless, and therefore to a large extent, rudderless. Now compare that to the Republican convention, which took place in Milwaukee in July this year — and the differences couldn’t be more stark.
The Republican Party is now, in effect, a fully owned subsidiary of brand Trump. It is the cult of personality writ large. It is all about him. L’etat c’est moi. And just as the Trump organisation is a family-run business, so his takeover of the Grand Old Party, as the Republicans used to be known, is complete and total.
The head of the Republican National Committee is a woman, and she has spoken out vociferously against positive discrim- ination. She says that people should only be given a job based on their ability and experience. And I am sure that is what was uppermost in the selection panel’s mind when Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, was given the job, despite no previous experience.
Longstanding servants of the party who go back to the Bush era have been purged. The headquarters has been moved to West Palm Beach in Florida, next to Mar-a-Lago — Donald Trump’s private members’ club where he now lives. And when Trump was president his two most senior advisers were his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner.
The US and UK parties also physically look different. The thing that always makes me laugh about British party conferences is the appearance. At Labour, it’s full of 50-year-olds dressing as though they are still 20, while at the Tories it’s crammed with pimply 20-year-olds who dress as though they’re 50.
Trump, the chosen one
At the US conventions it’s much more flamboyant, particularly at the Republicans where you dress to show your love for the Donald: badges, shirts, hats, trousers, socks and pants all in glory of their king.
And after the assassination attempt on Trump just before the convention, there was something else: there was a mystical, quasi-religious view among his supporters that it was God’s work that he had lived. In other words, Trump was the Second Coming. He was the chosen one.
This is not an exaggeration. Religiosity always struck me as a fundamental dividing line between US and UK politics. Among Republicans in the US it is normal and de rigeur to discuss at length your relationship with Jesus Christ. If you didn’t you would be considered unelectable. In Britain if you did that, you would be considered a crank. After the bullet whistled past Trump’s head, that fervour grew.
Perhaps the greatest difference between the US political parties and ours is structural. It is a total misconception to think them alike. In Britain, the Labour and Conservative parties function all year round, and have considerable power in terms of local associations, policy-making, deciding who candidates should be. Just look at the power that each wielded before July’s general election with key parliamentary seats being handed out to those who met with approval.
The Republicans and Democrats have no such centralised power. Because of the sheer geographical expanse of America, power is much more diffuse. Take the two senators in, say, North Dakota: they will run their own show.
They will be responsible for fundraising (a critical part of US politics); they will decide how they are going to vote on a given issue — and the party centrally, or the whips office on Capitol Hill, will have little control over what they do.
Party HQs in the US only really exist to provide some fundraising power and organisational muscle at election time. And of course there is no annual conference as we have here in Britain. The conventions only happen once every four years, just in advance of the presidential election.
They are not forums for debate. They are spectacles with theatrical production and glitz and glamour. When I was in Chicago in August for the Democratic Party convention I got a press release about how long it had taken to blow up the 17,000 balloons that fell from the roof of the arena at the finale after Kamala Harris’s speech.
In Chicago we had the Obamas, the Clintons and Joe Biden. There was a message from the centenarian ex-president, Jimmy Carter. There were rock stars galore and A-list actors on parade. In Birmingham we’ve had — checks notes — Liz Truss.
Jon Sopel is host of The News Agents podcast and author of Strangeland: How Britain Stopped Making Sense
