Electric Review

CONFERENCE 02: It was all too easy to get a drink at the Highcliff
Bournemouth diary, day I

My head hurts
There’s a strange mood to this conference — a sort of eerie, something bad’s about to happen, but we don’t know what, sensation. Of course I may be filtering these views through the prism of a man who found it disturbingly easy to get to the bar at the Highcliff last night. The previous night (Sunday) saw a relaxed, defenestrated Chairman doing something uncharacteristic and making good with the small talk. David Davis, for it was he, was looking relaxed in his lemon, open-necked shirt, and was impressively free and easy with his chit-chat. I’ve never seen that before, and you know, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It must portend something, but what? what can it possibly mean? A question for the ages I fear.

Perhaps the odd air at the BIC stems from the fact that, for the duration of conference, and at the direction of CCO, the place has been declared a no-smoking zone. Which is of a piece with other tendencies in the party, and, inevitably, another sign of how we’ve already changed so much, despite the pitiful fears of our Portilloite friends. I thought on that when I bumped into the always equally impressive figure of Charles Hendry: the fellow, who after that PR disaster with the Indy hackette and the CF goons, rebuked the children for singing anti-IRA songs on the grounds that these were ‘anti-Irish’, and unhelpful to the peace process. Yes, I think it’s fair to say that that wouldn’t have happened in Maggie’s day, and must therefore be accounted progress of a sort. Mind you, some things never change, as I reflected when I waved Alan Duncan off with some young friends of his, as they departed to go ‘bopping’.

Damian talks sense, Theresa doesn’t
In addition to a passable speech on education yesterday, Mr Green had words of wisdom too on the subject of the hour:

Far too much of the modernisation debate is about the party itself and I don’t think that people are very interested in that . . . My modernising colleagues seem to have missed the point. Candidate selection is of passionate interest to a very small group of people.

Sadly for the party, and its future hopes for tranquillity, the Party Chairman thinks otherwise. Mrs May’s speech, school-marmish, hectoring and hideously-shod, contained many throwbacks visually to the 1980s, but the content was fairly far detached from being election-winning stuff. A respectable, willing even, welcome was offered to Mrs May to begin with, but once the ranting started, conference fell ominously silent, and it’s hard to blame them, for there were some real shockers in this over-long offering.

In terms of obvious, functional stupidity — the sort of thing that it doesn’t matter what party you’re in, and what your specific challenges are — the stand-out idiocy was being willing to self-wound, but not to kill. The Chairman talked allusively of the bounders who had stood where she had in years gone by, but entirely predictably, when pressed afterwards, ‘who? who were these rotters?’ answers came there none. A bad case of ‘naming and shaming’, without, er, actually naming.

Doubtless some were taken with the ‘whining woman in focus group’ stuff, bemoaning yah-boo politics (smacked bottoms presumably for the rambunctious Tim Collins?) but given the tone and manner in which Mrs May attacked her own party, it’s hard quite to see how the whole ‘niceness’ thing is meant to work. After all, being nice starts at home, if it’s going to happen anywhere. Moreover, and here’s where you surely see most clearly the influence of Portilloite hands in this miserable oration, the whole analysis is wrong. For what can we make of this unimpressive take on reality, ‘politicians are seen as untrustworthy and hypocritical. We talk a different language. We live in a different world. We seem to be scoring points, playing games and seeking personal advantage’? Very little because it falls into the standard trap virtually all bogus modernism does: it doesn’t even begin to make any sense. There is one perfectly simple guide we should all have to hand when considering what the problems of the party actually are, and how we might solve them, we should be able to take whatever explanatory tool we have devised and apply it to the Labour party’s success too. So let’s start with that insight cited above — does it account for Labour’s enormous lead in the polls, or its vast parliamentary majority? No.

Inevitably we were told that to oppose government policy on, for example, Iraq, was just the sort of thing a caring, sharing opposition ought not to do. Why was left unsaid was why? As, obviously, what was at stake here was simply that we should not be seen to be doing something that, in Mrs May’s opinion, is less than huggable. Rather more surprising were the heights of invective that the Party Chairman managed to soar to when she lambasted the party’s recent past. Which in itself was as disappointing and churlish as the Party Leader’s sour and ungenerous attack on his predecessor but one — exactly the sort of fratricide we’re meant not to be engaged in, but still. Anyway, someone writing the Chairman’s speech evidently felt they had a lot to repay the party for, and went to town accordingly.

Twice we went to the country unchanged, unrepentant, just plain unattractive. And twice we got slaughtered. Soldiering on to the next election without radical, fundamental change is simply not an option.

More than that, we must step up the pace of change.

There’s a prospect, and sensible too as, ‘Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us — the nasty party.’ You do have to work hard sometimes to avoid the feeling that when some of us describe the rest of us as being ‘nasty’, there’s a combination of projection, and a slightly sad if comprehensible recording of the reaction with which the speaker has met with to date in the party, going on here.

The meat in the sandwich
Shortly after the injunction that there should be, ‘no more glib moralising, no more hypocritical finger wagging’, Theresa May told us what was what:

[A]s our country has become more diverse, our party has remained the same.

We should not underestimate the extent of this problem. Ask yourselves: how can we truly claim to be the Party of Britain, when we don’t truly represent Britain in our Party?

Are we really giving everyone in our society a fair chance to represent the Conservative Party?

There might be a slight inkling of what’s to come at the back of your mind, a small bead of fear may rise on the back of your neck, but don’t worry: ‘As a Tory woman I’m instinctively suspicious of positive discrimination’, starts the chairman, gender-stereotyping somewhat, before going on to declaim, and threaten, and bluster:

I’m a passionate believer in meritocracy. But are we in the Conservative Party really choosing our candidates on merit? Isn’t it time we were more open-minded about what makes the best candidate?

Our associations cherish their independence, but with independence comes responsibility. When selecting a candidate you aren’t simply choosing someone to represent your association or your area. Your candidate becomes the face of the Conservative Party.

So don’t ask yourself whether you would be happy to have a drink with this person on a Sunday morning, ask instead what this person says about us.

At the last general election 38 new Tory MPs were elected. Of that total only one was a woman and none was from an ethnic minority. Is that fair? Is one half of the population entitled to only one place out of 38?

That’s not meritocracy - that’s a travesty and it will never be allowed to happen again.

To answer this set of questions very quickly — yes, at the moment, we are choosing our candidates on merit, or as close to merit as any result ever derived from a free vote will ever produce. Whereas, if Mrs May pushes through the sort of changes she so clearly wants to, we won’t be, we’ll be choosing second and third rate candidates on the basis that that makes our ethnic, and sexual quotients that bit happier. Theresa May can harangue conference as much as she wants, but as her stumbling subsequent media performances have clearly shown, even she lacks the suicidal incompetence to start delivering on this project.

This was shown very clearly afterwards, at the National Convention, where Mrs May enjoyed easily the frostiest reception this notoriously supine body has ever handed out to anyone. A series of well-targeted hostile questions, and the faltering response to them, displayed all to well what it is the Portilloites dislike most about this painfully surrogate regime, in that it anticipated all too well the performance Mrs May would give to the hacks later. To their repeated questioning as to, where exactly will the resettlement camps for traditionalist be built? Again, mumbling and fudge. The Portilloites, in their house-organ, The Times, made their familiar Caliban cry about the tool fate has delivered into their hands: ‘the Conservative leader offers the impression that he knows what needs to be done but is reluctant to risk division doing it’. This is what is known in the trade as the Sinn Fein gambit — you welcome consensus, provided what you want is done, your opponent, by seeking his own, dastardly, ends, is the source of all division. And only a Portilloite could conceive of the fancy that Mr Duncan Smith is blind to the division he has caused since becoming leader, that he ‘wants to take everyone with him’. It gets, for our modernist chums over in Wapping, much worse however:

For every shift to the centre, such as a new focus on public services, there is a partial retreat elsewhere, notably on Section 28. For each enlightened Shadow Cabinet member, such as Oliver Letwin, there are others such as Tim Collins [Mr Hayes might sue at this implied slight], determined to oppose Labour on every front possible.

Which, naturally, is a terrible thing. Worse still (can it get much worse?), Mr Duncan Smith’s CCO has ‘lured and lost individuals at bewildering speed’ — for leader writers at The Times few things are of more import that what tiny, little people in private offices are up to. That’s the sort of thing that is hugely more consequential than, say, the composition of the parliamentary party in a parliamentary system of government, being concerned with that as an earlier kettle, uh, leader on this theme dismissively and blackly noted, is to be ‘obsessive’. Anyway, ‘it is this sense of uncertainty, almost drift [bad Iain], that has fuelled a whispering campaign against the leader. It is that charge the he needs to rebut with vigour this week by unambiguously aligning himself with those who contend that the Conservative Party has to be changed radically’. Or else. I mean, Mr Duncan Smith surely wouldn’t want to continue delivering Portilloism so slowly, or who knows, he might end up facing an even more abusive whispering campaign?

Moving on, moving back
What The Times, which we can soon dispense with, parades as its greatest fear — ‘the worst possible outcome’ — is ‘half-modernisation’ (shades of, ‘it vos meant to be a thing of beauty, not a monster’). Mrs May is determined to see them sleep safely at night on this score. Whether she’ll be able to deliver on the Portilloite agenda is quite another matter. By all accounts, the ‘back to Thatcherism’, er, wait a moment, that doesn’t make any sense, shtick, was thrown together at the last moment in Smith Sq, and unfortunately, in some speeches, that’s stuck out.

The contributions from the floor haven’t been much cop (but then the poor, hand-picked, dears haven’t been given much of a chance), the video diaries have been as dismal as we all expected this ruse would be — and Newsnight competently enough kicked the ball onto this open goal last night. And as for the external speakers, well, we’ll say no more about it, much like the mainstream media did.

Over at the fringe, John Bercow told us — and again, there was more than the hint of a Portilloite threat in this proposition — that there was a very powerful case for gay marriage. Indeed, our latter-day Chatham opined, ‘I regard it as a litmus test of whether the Conservative Party is determined to change’, to which one can only reply, fair enough, I suppose it’ll do.

That old thing
To return to the meeting of the National Convention, but to avert our eyes from the chairman’s pasting, there were other delights on offer. From the Policy Unit in CCO, Greg Clark and Tracy-Jane Malthouse explained the joys of the Conservative Policy Forums, and a touch unfairly were subject to madness about the elected component therein. Fortunately John Taylor was to hand to sagely counsel, ‘well it all seems to be working at the moment’, so why would we be wanting any of that?

Monday wasn’t a happy day (I certainly needed a drink to get through it) and there’s no escaping what the leadership had so ineffably done to upset the membership, and that was to tell them what they don't want to hear, don’t believe, and won’t do as regards candidate selection. Although the leader columns of The Times are both honest in their Portilloism (fradulent and incoherent a creed as this is) and open as to their paper’s lack of ultimate fealty to the party, it’s the leader’s friends over at the Wharf who are giving him the worst advice of all. In the course of the Telegraph’s wittering on this bitter matter, we were treated to unconvincing Portilloism filtered through the medium of standard-issue hysteria. Showing more starkly then ever why this paper’s op-ed section resembles nothing so much as The Daily Mail’s with A-levels, we were told, ‘the Tories, contrary to all expectations and all electoral logic, have fallen further behind since the 2001 election’. This might lead some of us to adjust our previous expectations and habits of logic, but not the Telegraph — no, reality is going to be made to catch up with theory one way or the other.

Emulating the almost cheerfully open threat from Wapping, Mr Duncan Smith is informed — and you can hiss the words out whichever way you want, they’re still not going to come out overly cuddly — that, ‘he must be prepared to take risks in order to be noticed. Time is not on his side’. It’s difficult, at this rate, to see who exactly is. In possibly the wrongest summing up of events since General Custer said, ‘hmmn, they’ll have some nice ornamental ashtrays to take home with us’, the paper swipes at the wets but concludes that

Far more worrying for Mr Duncan Smith is the disillusionment in that section of the party that supported his leadership bid. People who ought to be allies complain that his reluctance to offend any section of opinion has led to paralysis.

No, that’s not quite it. What they complain about is that he has fundamentally betrayed, by candidate selection, and a host of other Portilloite projects, the manifesto on which he was elected. And as he’s now discovering, in losing all his own friends, he certainly hasn’t made any new ones.

Kit Kildare is ERO’s political correspondent, and that was yesterday; he is currently at work on today — email him about how your day has gone so far.

Kit Kildare, October 8, 2002 11:20 PM