Westminster Reflections

Sir Patrick Cormack MP

August in Staffordshire has hardly lived up to the ‘barbecue summer’ promises we were given in the spring. But it has been good to be away from Westminster and working from home, and at a rather gentler pace. Because we are taking our two-week holiday in September, I am obliged to write this before the party conference season begins, while the return of Parliament is still over four weeks away.

I have often thought it would be far better if the party conferences were done away with and replaced by weekend gatherings, preferably at the seaside, where party members could truly meet each other. When I first went to them in the early 1960s, party conferences were like that. We always met at a seaside resort, and there were several that had halls big enough to accommodate the needs of all three major parties. The Tories met not only in Blackpool, Brighton and Bournemouth, but also Scarborough and Llandudno.

The debates in the conference hall were, although stage-managed to a degree, proper debates. Resolutions were moved by constituency associations, and replied to by Ministers (or Shadow Ministers if we were not in power). There were a number of receptions for the party faithful and one or two fringe events, the most important of which was the annual Conservative Political Centre (an organisation since consigned to oblivion) lecture. It was always given by a leading party luminary and attended by virtually everybody. The most famous of these lectures was in 1963 in Blackpool, when, following Harold Macmillan’s resignation, Lord Hailsham announced he was to renounce his peerage and bid for the leadership. I thought the theatre was going to crash about our ears, so great was the tumult and the stamping of feet.

I merely mention all this to point out that the Conservative Party Conference in those days, and for many years after, was precisely that: a Party Conference, a gathering of the faithful. Although there was large trade union involvement, the Labour Party’s annual jamboree was very similar. But starting in the late 1970s, and continuing at a galloping pace thereafter, all changed. Only three seaside resorts – Brighton, Bournemouth and Blackpool – were big enough to house the increasing number of press and invited guests who came along (and we soon ditched Brighton because of the jibes of the Labour mayor) not to mention all those lobbying organisations who turned the conference environs into a trade fair, swamping us with corporate hospitality.

And the fringe has grown to such an extent that there are now literally hundreds of fringe meetings, many of them sponsored by commercial organisations. The Conservative Party Conference has become subsumed in a massive quasi trade and commercial convention where oceans of indifferent wine is drunk into the small hours of the morning and where no one, however conscientious, can hope to attend everything. And as the fringe and the trade fair have grown, so have the debates disappeared, to be replaced by a series of presentations and pronouncements in a hall where the conference platform has been turned into a television set.

As the conference has changed, so have I. Where I used to go for the duration I now go for a day. And in going I cannot even fill my lungs with sea air – last year we were in Birmingham, while this year we are in Manchester.

But this year these mass gatherings will be important, both for us and for the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. For these are the last opportunities for the party leaderships to seek to harangue and enthuse their faithful before the next General Election. Mr Brown will have to try and persuade his followers that he has that decisiveness and sense of purpose to lead the country out of recession. Mr Cameron has to show that he is able to replace the sternness, taciturnity and fumbling ineptitude that has become the hallmark of Number Ten over the last two years with a breadth of vision, and a determination, that can revive not only the nation, but the whole democratic process. For Mr Clegg, the task is a rather different one. He has to demonstrate that his Party will be able to provide the restraining influence that, he will argue, will be needed whoever occupies Number Ten after the votes are counted.

After the conferences the fervent activists in each party will proclaim that their leader has succeeded. But the measure of conference success is never properly assessed the day after. It is tested when Parliament reassembles and the business of government is exposed to detailed scrutiny once more. 
But then comes our danger, for Conservatives must not boastfully assume that victory will be ours on polling day, whether that be in March, April, May or June. The biggest mistake in politics is to underestimate the opposition, and the second biggest is to take things for granted. I learned that lesson in 1970 when I managed to win my seat with the biggest swing to the Conservatives in the country. My opponent, the redoubtable Labour veteran Jennie Lee, had been so confident of success that a splendid celebration lunch was organised to follow the midday count. It was left uneaten.