God save us from conference season

It is a festival of oblivion. But you can save yourself.

Photo by Anderson Rian on Unsplash

Conference season is upon us again, starting today with Reform in Birmingham, and there is therefore an opportunity to tell you what conference season is like. It is vapid, godless, nihilistic and mortifying, an insult against the better aspects of the political character, the intellectual equivalent of sipping a cold cup of tea in a tepid bath.

My primary association with it is smell, specifically the smell of people's mouths. No-one warns you before you arrive that this will be the case. No-one notifies you that your primary sensory experience of this event will be a vicious long-run assault against the olfactory nerve. But this is your fate and you must accept it.

It starts at some fringe event or other. This is the area away from the main stage, composed of panel discussions and networking events, where things are supposedly more interesting and less managed. In reality, they're nothing of the sort. Political panels are shit at the best of times - the very sight of them makes my heart sink - but panels at conference are particularly bland, an assemblage of nothing wheeled out at a deathly slow pace, every moment an affront to your decision-making ability, because of course if you made decisions sensibly you would neve have found yourself in this place, with these people, listening to these listless words.

It's here that you first experience the smell. There'll be little bites to eat - vol-au-vents maybe, or little sausage rolls. You will subsist on these for days, as you trudge the wind-swept streets of whichever godforsaken town they've decided to hold the event in. They're all you'll really eat. You'll never be hungry, but you'll never be full either. You will exist in a perpetual state of semi-satiation.

After the event, an elderly man - nearly all the members are elderly, nearly all of them men - will accost you and tell you at length about his opinions. And there, backed up against a wall, your eyes glancing around nervously for some kind of escape, you will smell it for the first time: his mouth. The pent up odour of decades of ineffectual dental hygiene, combined with whatever was being served at the event. Ah yes, you think: slices of roast beef and onion. Very often at conference you can see little bits of left-over sandwich on people's lips, tiny white blobs of food matter, and you become fixated by it, gazing intently as you drift off into whatever internal reverie you have adopted to help yourself escape this terrible place.

The smell is a problem because conferences are an exercise in proximity. That, after all, is why people are there. Party members want proximity to each other and front benchers. Businesses want proximity to political decision makers. Journalists want proximity to politicians. So the party crams them into the conference space, and people cram into the events and then, in the evening, everyone crams into the bar. Most of the business people there have corporate accounts and are gleefully spanking them out. Most of the journalists can expense their purchases. And most of the politicians love being bought drinks.

Time sloshes out into the early hours. It's like a Hogarth painting. You've never seen this many political animals so close together, so close that the moisture on their skin starts to rub off on each other, intermingling, so close that you do really become accustomed to having someone's spittle on your mouth and eventually stop even noticing. Hundreds of political animals, thousands of them, pressed up close, crammed onto the limited space, laughing, shouting, whispering, sweating profusely, slathering each other with their opinions and their internal fluids.

No-one in that room will have eaten a salad in years, so the smell of food that emerges is invariably that of cheap meat: a sausage roll perhaps, if you're lucky, with the pastry offsetting the pork. If you're unlucky, something hot and heavy with a piercing, decisive aroma. Eventually the smell of all the meat combines with the smell of everyone's bodies, so that you start to dissolve the distinction between us and the rendered animal flesh we consume, all of it amalgamating in the air, dead and alive, in a combined expression of our base nature.

It is at this moment, when the meat of the political animal becomes manifest, that the parties start making money. Around 12,000 people attend these things, with all of them paying for the privilege apart from the journalists and politicians. The businesses then shell out cash for all sorts of things - stands promoting their activity, sponsored events, leaflets in nearby hotel rooms. No-one pays the slightest bit of notice to any of this, of course. There's an obstacle course of stands in the conference centre which anyone with sense avoids, but for some inexplicable reason the companies still seem to think it a sensible use of funds. It is a flat refutation of the view, always common in political circles, that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. They wantonly spaff their cash away just like everyone else.

The parties make decent money from this operation. Labour doesn't separate conference income from other commercial sources, but it is clearly imperative to the financial operation. The fourth paragraph of its financial statement last year stated: "The conference drew higher delegate and commercial visitor attendance than anticipated and contributed income beyond planned levels, underscoring our ability to drive commercial success alongside our core mission."

Its overall commercial income last year - most of presumably from conference - was £13,489,000, up from 7,538,000 in 2023. It's one of the benefits of being in government - business interests and high value individuals take notice of you. The Tories do separate conference income from other commercial income, although this includes other smaller events throughout the year. They made just £5,511,000, down from £6,887,000 in 2023 (you can find all the numbers here).

There are several moral problems with this funding arrangement. The main problem is that it fails to provide an effective opposition. Proper state funding would allow the opposition to challenge the government more effectively, because it would no longer be quite so hopelessly outgunned by the civil service. Instead, free-for-all private funding lowers parties' income just when they go into opposition and most need it. State funding would also prevent what is effectively authorised corruption - the shabby little game of businesses seeking to establish loyalties among politicians, conducted as if it were tolerable when it so plainly is not. But most importantly, it would remove the need for me to have ever been in one of those hotel bars, at three in the morning, listening to some long-winded bore tell me his theory about politics while showering me in halitosis.

The businesspeople at least make sense. They have defined and clearly articulated goals. But the members are very confusing people indeed. Why are you here, you wonder, as you watch them scurry from one place to the next. What are you doing? What strange sequence of tragedies led to this outcome? It's not your fault, of course. We are all the victim of our circumstance. But surely you can see the error. Surely you can glimpse the terrible coming revelation on your deathbed, that last-minute recognition that you have totally wasted your life on a series of pointless excursions into the political wasteland.

I was once having breakfast at conference when I heard the excited babble of young people behind me. You always notice the young people at these things because there are so few of them and those that are present are invariably the weirdest of the lot. They were from some kind of Labour students group. They all had a copy of the conference document and were trying to get it signed by every member of the front bench. I cradled my head in my hands. For god sake take drugs, I thought. For god sake fuck each other, or go to Tibet, or develop an addiction, or write terrible poetry that doesn't rhyme. Anything but this.

There is no meaningful voice for members at conference. The Conservatives, to their credit, never pretended there was. Members have no formal say over policy and no votes at conference. They attend anyway, wasting the precious few days of life still left to them in a parody of political activity.

Strangely though, the absence of voting actually lends Tories a trace of dignity. At least their leadership doesn't bullshit them. At least they are honest about their indifference towards their views. At the Labour conference delegates vote constantly, on all sorts of things, to precisely no effect.

I can't be fucked to recount the history of trade union and constituency voting block reforms - Alan Wager does a decent potted account here - nor can I be bothered to outline the precise relationship between the Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs), the Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), the National Policy Forum (NPF), the Joint Policy Committee (JPC) and the National Executive Committee (NEC), which decides what is discussed and voted on at conference. None of it really matters. Labour's committees are a maze with no centre. They lead to no destination and are not intended to. They are intended to take the something-must-be-done activist spirit of its members and contain it, so that it can walk the hallways of this maze with a sense of purpose and without ever realising that it has undertaken a journey to nowhere. Having been safely sequestered where it can do no harm, the spirit can then be bottled and used as an energy source to power the party's leafleting and door-knocking operation, getting the vote out on polling day.

I used to be outraged by the way that party democracy had been eradicated, but that was before I met party members. Then I slowly began to understand that it is far better to exclude these people as thoroughly as possible from the decision-making process. MPs are little better, but they at least have the sense of jeopardy and compromise that comes from the chance that they will lose their job at an election. There is no good democratic reason why these tribal campaigners - people so unusual they would choose to use their annual leave to attend an early autumn conference - should have a privileged place in the policy-making landscape.

In those rare moments when they do get a voice, they fuck it up badly. Look at how Tory party members used their power to elect a leader - by selecting Boris Johnson, a mewling lying venal toad, then Liz Truss, a broken imbecile, and then Rishi Sunak, before eventually opting for Kemi fucking Badenoch. This is not the behaviour of people who can be taken seriously. The fact that members have no meaningful say makes conference pointless. But if they did have a meaningful say it would be a fucking travesty.

If you're a journalist, you spend very little time with the members. You look on them like a kind of fauna roaming the landscape, inscrutable. Instead, you spend your time with other journalists, think tank people, politicians, special advisers, MPs' assistants, the motley variants of the political class, who are all the same person really, the same personality type, the same bundle of childhood trauma and formative bullying experiences. Before I ever attended one of these things I presumed, in an offhand and uninterrogated way, that people spoke about ideas. They absolutely do not do that and I have never heard anyone even consider doing so. To even begin to speak about ideas would be considered earnest and embarrassing, childlike.

Instead, the conversation is based on gossip and strategy. Gossip is the currency by which you establish status - utter dross - and strategy is the topic of conversation. There is little-to-no mention of whether a policy is a good idea or not. Instead it is evaluated by the strategic impact it will have - does it wrong-foot the opposition, does it consolidate the authority of the leader, does it open up a split in the party?

And every day, every hour, people will talk about the leader's conference speech, the crescendo of this awful melody. What will they say? Will it change the political weather? Will it save them from their party critics and spare them a leadership contest? Will it trigger a change in the opinion polls? Will it fundamentally alter our political calculations?

The answer to all these questions is no. It will make no difference whatsoever. Take you, for example. You are a political nerd. Look at the state of you, reading this newsletter. Obviously broken. Now quick: what was Keir Starmer's conference speech about last year?

You don't know, do you. You can't remember a thing about it. Not a word, not one phrase. Neither can I. I've had sandwiches in the 90s I remember better than the prime minister's conference speech in 2024. And yet, in a couple of weeks, the opinion pieces will start coming out. This is a make or break speech for Starmer. This is his chance to turn it all around or condemn himself to political disaster. And then he'll do the speech and nothing will change and in a year's time they'll write the same fucking opinion piece and we'll all fucking read it, like the bovine herd we so obviously are.

I can think of two examples of conference speeches which actually changed something. The first was Neil Kinnock's 'grotesque chaos' speech from Labour's 1985 conference - one of the finest pieces of oratory in the modern era. And the other was Theresa May's tacit announcement that Britain was leaving the single market and customs union in the Conservatives' 2016 conference - one of the most unforgivably idiotic pieces of oratory in the modern era, whose ramifications we are still living with today. That latter example wasn't even her main conference speech, it was a quick statement at the start of conference.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the conference speech is entirely pointless, accomplishes nothing and is forgotten instantly. It is therefore the perfect ending to an event which contains no sense of meaning whatsoever. It serves as a fitting climax to a festival of political oblivion.

People often stop paying attention to politics in August. If they had any sense they would stop in September instead, and skip the whole conference season. They would then emerge in early October no less informed and much better rested. I would strongly advise you do the same.

Odds and sods

As always this newsletter is available as a podcast here, or on Spotify or by clicking play up above, just under the headline. Like, subscribe, write a review, tell your friends etc.

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