I just walked in and passed by my kitchen telly which showed a close up of 'Dave' and his chubby chipmunk cheeks wobbling with self-satisfaction as he slowed the delivery of his conference speech to indicate how serious he was and told us all, with great sincerity, that he intended to cut down on non-EU immigration and take steps to oust illegal immigrants. My reaction, as I scrabbled desperately for the 'do-flicker-thingie', was to shout, "You fat-faced fucking liar", and then I found it and, heaven be praised, he was no more. I apologe for the obscenity but plead provocation as mitigation. As I trudged up the stairs to my eyrie in the roof space I kept asking myself a question: who goes to these useless conferences and why? Flicking through the news sites I think I found the answer from the genial but very shrewd Quentin Letts from The Daily Mail:
It is not that I am a saint. I have sucked on the odd sherbet myself. I confess that on Sunday night, between the hours of 8 and 10.30pm, your honour, I was given dinner (four-course Chinese) by a friend who left Fleet Street for the PR business and is now a millionaire. So I am not spotless. Father, forgive me, I have dined.
Even so, the level of drinking at this year’s conferences has been astonishing. I did hope that, given the state of the nation’s economy, they might rein themselves in.
But at all three conferences - not just the Tories in Manchester but also Labour in Liverpool and the Lib Dems in Birmingham - the evening carousing has been beyond sybaritic.
By day they have talked of cuts. By night they have been Bacchanalian. Grotesque. Ponds, lakes, lagoons of alcohol have been consumed, while the rest of the country teeters on the brink of a double-dip recession.
I have seen frontbench MPs in all three parties barely able to speak, so much have they gargled down. The organisers of one conference cocktail party had to employ thick-necked bouncers to stop gatecrashers.
And of course, like old-style Soviet apparatchiks, these creepie-crawlies are fenced in behind security fences and guards every five yards. Are ordinary voters welcome to any of these binges? Not bloody likely! Even the party activists are pushed to the sidelines:
The past three weeks have given delegates only the tiniest part in proceedings. Party activists have not been stitched up. They have been stitched out.
The 21st century party conference draws, instead, a rum crowd, mainly commercial. Public relations operatives swarm like nests of flies reactivated by the Indian summer. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even.
Modern party conferences are all about money. Fund-raising. The parties charge high fees not only to attending delegates, but also to companies taking out exhibition space.
Needless to say, the politicians being stupid beyond belief they fail even to engage with those of us at home who, in different circumstances might be interested to see and hear what they have to say, because their PR men leak the speeches the night before and such mild interest as might have existed is instantly expunged. The whole rotten system is a waste of time and effort and serves merely to make the political class even more detached than it is. One's hatred for them all grows apace and it can only be a matter of time before the tumbrils are called for:
It is not just the loucheness, the licentiousness (much corridor creeping at night) and the shadow of corruption. It is also the heinous cost of security at these week-long events. And it is the remoteness they engender, the conference venues being cut off by tall fences.
The contribution of party conferences to genuine political engagement has dwindled to near nothing. The speeches are formulaic and colourless. Policy decisions are now made by analysing focus groups. Reputations are generally made in the TV studios.
A pox on all of them, I say!
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