‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, dead, dead, dead,” scream the protesters as they file past the Midland hotel in Manchester. It is a cruel greeting for the Conservative party as it gathers in this most un-Tory city. “Filth, you’re a waste of space, a waste of oxygen,” they shout at the shiny young delegates as they pass. I suggest to a policeman that this constitutes intimidation, especially the bloke in the “Kill Tory scum” T-shirt who is filming people as they enter the secure zone. “We have to protect people’s right to protest, but it’s a fine line,” he admits.
The most vocal are a group of people dressed as badgers. “Cull the Tories, not the badgers,” reads one sign. If Ed Miliband, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a badger, were to make this his core theme, he would sweep the country. Two young men are handing out the Conservative Home newspaper in the midst of the Tory-baiting throng. I admire their commitment and ask them when they joined the party. “We’re not members,” one tells me. “We work for a promotions company. We go where we’re put. I’m Labour actually.”
As the protesters mark Lady Thatcher’s passing, so too does conference, which opens with a video of her greatest triumphs. This is a huge mistake because her star quality only emphasises how feeble her successors are. The Daily Politics programme is running a best-PM poll, asking delegates to put a blue ball in plastic containers marked “Thatcher” and “Cameron”. The Thatcher box is brimming; the Cameron box shows a marked lack of balls.
Demonstrators protest on the first day of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester. Photograph: Phil Noble
The main hall, give or take the odd dyspeptic colonel – one of them does a terrific job of disrupting defence secretary Philip Hammond’s speech on the opening day – is dull. The real action is on the fringe. These political rituals have become like the Edinburgh festival: unappealing offerings on the main stage but a cornucopia of possibilities in small venues in and around the secure zone. I plan to go to the RSPCA’s beer and curry night, but the free food and drink has attracted vast crowds of underfed delegates and I can’t get in.
So I dutifully attend a foodless Bright Blue event on economic growth instead. This proves fortuitous, as it is fascinating. Bright Blue are a new progressive Conservative pressure group run by seven of the absurdly young people who now seem to drive the party. Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, despite arriving late thanks to Virgin Trains (“Who privatised the railways?” he demands), is on the panel and quickly into his stride. “What we have is a fake recovery achieved by bussing in more people,” he says, “and it’s a recovery built on debt.” This is a useful counterweight to the chancellor’s panglossian claims later in the week. Nelson is also good on the death of the much-lamented big society, which is now the great Tory unmentionable. “It lies in a shallow grave somewhere,” says Nelson, “but I rather liked it.”
Much as I enjoy the Bright Blue event, missing out on the curry is a disaster, as the search for food at conference is constant. I buy a cream egg at the demo from a man selling food “in aid of grassroots vegan campaigning”. “It’s like Cadbury’s,” he says. A snip at £1.30. They only have unappetising beef pies at airport prices in the secure zone, so I have to resort to McDonald’s, where I bump into the newly ennobled Danny Finkelstein, Times grandee and now Tory peer, who is coming out as I am going in. Glamorous world, politics.
Boris Johnson has a big vision. Photograph: Oli Scarff
Finding alcohol, though, is not a problem. After doing the rounds of fringe meetings, I gatecrash a late-evening drinks reception at the Midland hotel – the sexually charged centre of the conference – hosted by Conservative Voice, which campaigns in Tory marginals. Nineteen-year-old Charlotte Woods, who is chair of Conservative Future in Manchester, kindly gives me her drinks voucher. “Say nice things about me when I’m an MP,” she says breezily. Irritatingly I am not allowed into the packed Conservative Way Forward do at midnight. The Tory conference slogan is “For Hardworking People”. “For Hard-drinking People” seems more appropriate.
My excesses mean I miss the Alastair Campbell run and breakfast in aid of Alcohol Concern at 7.30 the following morning. Campbell perfectly sums up conference in his parting tweet from Manchester: “Tory conference v different from 20 years ago. Too corporate, not enough politics. Also reminds me of Russia – mainly ugly men and pretty women.” Stumble through the lounge of the Midland in the early hours, and you see how accurate that description is.
I spot the chief whip Sir George Young at a fringe meeting and tax him about the corporateness of conference. He starts to agree and to suggest ways more members can be encouraged to come – only 38% of the attendees in Manchester are party members; the rest are lobbyists and journalists – but then checks himself. “Chief whips are not allowed to have views,” he says.
Young has come to listen to his old colleague Ken Clarke speak at a fringe meeting about whether Britain should leave the EU. Clarke makes much the best speech I hear over the three days, beautifully delivered, cogently argued, underlining once again that he should have led the Conservative party. Young, modest and unassuming, watches from the back of the room, a smile playing across his lips in appreciation of a master politician at work. Clarke is now in his 70s, but wipes the floor with the oratorically challenged young junior ministers I have to endure at other meetings. He has said he will stand again in 2015 – “I’m an incurable parliamentarian,” he tells the audience at another meeting – and will be a key figure in the EU referendum campaign in 2017.
Back in the main hall, George Osborne also makes a capable speech, if you set aside the inflated claims for what he has achieved. But it strikes me that while his desire to turn Britain into a dynamic, thrusting Asian tiger economy – all whizzing trains and fracking wells – will play well with the bright young things at conference, it may have limited appeal in Matlock or Middlesbrough. Conservatives don’t seem to want to conserve anything any more. Boris Johnson echoes Osborne, portraying Britain as a larger Singapore and envisaging the UK becoming Europe’s most populous nation. Their message is one of uber-liberalism and could play into the hands of Ukip, who present themselves as the party for people left behind in the global race.
It’s a relief to escape the secure zone after the two-hour session on the economy and experience the world beyond. The “Kill Tory Scum” man has been replaced by a large inflatable white elephant emblazoned with the slogan “Stop HS2″ – Osborne gives the project a vote of confidence but most of the members I speak to want it scrapped. The street outside the venue is filled with people handing out flyers – another echo of the Edinburgh festival. “This nation is under God’s judgment,” reads one leaflet. “We will see increasing calamity in this nation and throughout the world. There is no hope for Britain, but there is hope for you.” It is certainly an antidote to Osborne’s relentless optimism.
Nigel Farage enjoys a pint and Ukip’s ability to rock the Tory boat. Photograph: Christopher Thomond
The Bruges Group is holding a lunchtime meeting – with no free lunch, of course – in Manchester town hall, at which Ukip leader Nigel Farage is speaking. This feels like a proper political event, full of cameramen and ultra-enthusiastic Ukip supporters. Tory high command took the event out of the official programme, making it a cause celebre and ensuring a huge degree of interest. The echoey hall is gorgeous, so much more vivid than the characterless aircraft hangar in which the conference is being held, and Farage and veteran Conservative eurosceptic MP Bill Cash clash over whether Ukip should stand aside in 2015. Cash thinks they should, or Labour could win thanks to the split in the rightwing vote. Farage, who has an extremely loud voice, tells him to stop being patronising. This is all music to Ed Miliband’s ears.
I catch up with the Ukip leader later at A Beer and a Fag with Nigel Farage, an event at the Comedy Store, which is a 15-minute walk from the conference centre. He is, indeed, having a fag outside when we talk. Does he fear letting in Miliband and thus losing the in/out referendum on the EU that Cameron has promised? “Why would we lose the referendum?” he says. “That presupposes Labour won’t be offering a referendum at the next election, which of course they will.”
Farage is the ghost at the Tory feast – I speak metaphorically of course, given the absence of anything edible at the conference. Ukip polled just 3% in the 2010 election, yet are reckoned to have cost the Tories 20 seats. They currently stand at more than 10%, and if they got anything like that in 2015 the Tories would have little chance of winning an outright majority. “The Tories have got this massive dilemma,” Farage tells me. “They just don’t know what to do about us. Twenty-five per cent of their councils want to do a deal with us, but it’s a deal that isn’t going to happen. I’d be relaxed about local associations doing deals, but Cameron has slapped that idea down. As ever I’ve come here and tried to be helpful and constructive …” He laughs, long and loudly. He is rather pleased with the mayhem he has wrought in Manchester. “Someone said to me when I came here this morning: ‘God has wrecked your conference, now you’re going to wreck Cameron’s.’”
It’s an exaggeration; the conference has not been wrecked – if anything the Conservative party seems more at one with itself than when I was here in 2011 – but there is a recognition that winning in 2015 is going to be difficult. Clarke doesn’t sound as if he expects to win outright. “Getting a majority is going to be a very tall order,” he admits. “With multi-party politics it is very difficult.” He says the party will have to win back “sensible Conservatives” who voted Ukip in this year’s council elections, and rely on the Lib Dems reclaiming some of their more leftwing supporters from Labour.
Peter Bone, the eurosceptic Tory MP for Wellingborough and serial rebel, has a better idea – join forces with Ukip. “If we don’t reach some agreement, it’ll be the SDP-Labour model in reverse,” he tells me after a fringe meeting at which he savages the coalition with the Lib Dems and argues Cameron foisted it on the party undemocratically. “I think Ukip is here to stay. That’s not the view of the leadership and I hope they’re right, but if they are here to stay my solution has to be the answer.” Sadly, the legendary Mrs Bone, barometer of Britain, isn’t here to add weight to her husband’s argument. “She doesn’t come to conference,” he explains. “She’s too busy running the constituency office.”
The sort of accommodation favoured by Bone is unlikely to happen. Some on the right of the party would welcome it, but to others it would be anathema. If Osborne and Johnson want to turn Britain into a 21st-century Singapore, Ukip’s model is more Sidcup circa 1952. They are worlds apart. “Every European country has fringe parties, most of them on the right – anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, anti-problems,” says Clarke. “You have to take them on and marginalise them.”
David Cameron with his wife Samantha acknowledge the applause after his speech. Photograph: Leon Neal
Ann Widdecombe, who is doing a brisk trade signing copies of her autobiography Strictly Ann on the bookstall next to the main hall, believes the Tories can win without doing a deal with Ukip. “Next year at the Euro elections we will suffer,” she admits. “The voters don’t think the European elections matter and they can send us a pretty rude message about what they want. Ukip will take votes away on a temporary basis, but when it comes to voting for a government, people will think: ‘You vote Ukip, you get Miliband.’”
By the final morning, it has become a question of survival. Manchester is dank, and in the street outside the secure zone we are down to the hard core: the Falun Gong supporters protesting about organ harvesting; a chap in a dog collar standing on a soap box and preaching salvation in a voice as loud as Farage’s; the anti-frackers, and a middle-aged man handing out leaflets detailing a worldwide Jewish conspiracy with Boris Johnson at its centre.
I join the queue early for Cameron’s big speech. The party members who have lasted the week are in good heart. “This is my annual holiday,” says one. “It’s the only way of getting a break from the seat.” I am reluctant to admit it, but I quite like the Tories – dynamic, self-reliant, filled with a zealous certainty. And they queue beautifully.
Cameron’s speech is very, very competent, very son-of-Blair in its delivery and emotional range. He has some strong lines about finishing the job and securing the recovery, and the odd decent joke: “There is no job in the world where you don’t need to be able to add up [pause] … unless you join Labour’s frontbench economic team.” The faithful like it. “He was very strong and there were no gimmicks,” an elderly man in a union flag waistcoat tells me. But the bits he cites are cliches such as the ubiquitous “hand-up, not a handout”.
A speech that resorts to the hoary old metaphor about fixing the roof when the sun shines is not a great speech. I miss Boris’s stream-of-consciousness surges and references to Diocletian, and it should worry Cameron that most of the interest in the press room afterwards is in 12-year-old Xantaine Campbell, who offers up a marvellous paean to her free school in Birmingham. Xantaine has the X factor; Dave doesn’t.
The man in the waistcoat is another Tory who supports a deal with Ukip. “We both want the same thing,” he says, “and it’s foolish to fight each other.” But the closing music after Cameron’s speech is unlikely to appeal to the faragists – Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop, with its mantra: “Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.” The Ukippers reckon yesterday can be brought back, and if enough unreconstructed Tories feel the same, tomorrow might yet belong to Miliband.
Conservative conference: Ukip and Thatcher give David Cameron a headache
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