Party conference season’s back – and I love it
It’s 35 years now since I attended my first party conference. As an impoverished 18-year-old politics student I was too poor to book a B+B in Blackpool, and ended up pitching my tent under a not-yet-opened motorway bridge!
Labour’s visit to Blackpool in 1976 was one of the great party conferences of all time, with the new PM Jim Callaghan telling delegates the government could no longer spend its way out of trouble, and the chancellor Denis Healey turning round at Heathrow, en route to the IMF in Manila, to return to Blackpool to plead with his party to back his economic policies.
Four years later I was back in Blackpool covering the conference as a very junior ITN trainee. We stayed at the huge Norbreck Hydro up the coast, a ghastly East European style monstrosity of a hotel, though it was probably a small improvement on most Blackpool hotels and B+Bs in those days (of which my abiding memory is sticky carpets, and watered down orange juice at breakfast).
Party conferences were gruelling affairs in my early days in TV, Monday to Friday jobs. And I got into the habit of staying up until 4am imbibing the atmosphere and gossip at fringe meetings, receptions and the packed hotel bars.
Conferences have changed hugely in those 35 years. In many ways they’ve grown much more alike, full of fresh enthusiastic young careerists in smart suits, surrounded, it seems, by thousands of PR men and lobbyists – good for buying drinks, but most of them pretty useless for conversation. Many MPs don’t bother to go these days, as it’s too expensive, or they only come for one day.
The venues have changed too. Until not long ago party conferences were always in seaside towns – nearly always Brighton, Bournemouth or Blackpool, though in the distant past, smaller resorts like Margate, Bridlington, Hastings and Morecambe. Now big cities are the fashion, and for this year it’s a West Coast Mainline season – visiting Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. Virgin Trains must be delighted.
The stereotypical conference characters are also dying. At Labour, the white pot-bellied union delegate in a cheap suit and red tie. Union delegations are smaller these days, younger, with more women and ethnic minorities.
At the Conservatives, the blue-rinse old dears, who clapped the leader rapturously, don’t come so much now. I suspect it’s because city hotels are more expensive than seaside B+Bs – and going to Manchester is not their idea of a holiday.
As for the Liberals’ “brown rice and sandals” brigade, they’re now respectable ministerial advisers – or in the case of Tony Greaves, a member of the Lords.
Despite such changes, I love the conference season. The impassioned speeches. The rows. The gossip. The plotting. The excess consumption. The late nights. And afterwards, the exhaustion.