By the end of the Conservative party conference, Theresa May had suffered so many painful betrayals and humiliations that she should have ditched her speech and dropped a 60-minute visual album on Tidal instead. A lot of people wouldn’t have begrudged her the chance to stalk along the street in a yellow dress, baseball-batting a few cars.
That, clearly, would have been a show of strength a million miles beyond the prime minister: currently third among equals, dropping down the rankings fast, and agonisingly handed a P45 by a bottom-tier comedian during her own coughed-out conference speech. Even bits of the set were trying to escape. She had already spent four days in Manchester having to suck up all manner of indignities, while Boris Johnson’s address concluded “Let the lion roar!” Thanks, Uncle Scar! But you probably want to wipe Mufasa’s blood off your chin before you get the party faithful to sing along to The Circle of Life.
I lost count of things that were obviously being said for a dare. “We were pleased with the way it went,” judged May’s spokesman of her speech. “I witnessed a great speech from a prime minister at the top of her game,” declared Michael Gove. “That is their cosmic role in life,” explained James Cleverly about Labour, “to screw things up, so we can come and fix them.” Has he been watching the past two years on tape delay? The Tories are like something out of Cowboy Builders: they tell you that you need a new boiler, and by the time they’re done, you’ve got no roof, a sinkhole and euro parity. For the love of God, guys, please stop fixing things.
May herself was asked if she would change tack and do the leaders’ television debates during the next general election. I mean, really … you might as well ask her if she’s going to take four strikers to the Qatar World Cup. “Weak leadership,” she said later, “is having a cabinet full of yes men.” A reminder of how lucky we are to live in the time of this inspiring Team of Rivals reboot. With the Brexiters, it was mostly excruciatingly easy to see what they were playing at. “We are the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen,” announced David Davis, “of Alexander Fleming and James Dyson.” Assuming anyone can join in this game: we are the country of John Milton and George Eliot, of Isaac Newton and that guy who owns Wetherspoons.
But before we go on: the science bit. Last year, the Tories were bedding in for a good 15 years of uninterrupted rule; this year, they were coming to terms with the fact that the bed had been shat. “We had an election that nobody expected to take place,” said party chairman Patrick McLoughlin. The snap election had caught the Tories off guard, May explained to the House magazine, recalling that moment a highly emotional Withnail accosts a farmer and explains: “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!” The Tories seemed to have called an election by mistake.
This conference was a bogglingly unsuccessful attempt to contain the fallout, which repeatedly threatened to spill over into open recrimination. Everywhere you went, you could hear party members muttering furiously about wanting big ideas, a big vision. Yet the main vision they were offered by main-stage speakers was the dystopian one of Jeremy Corbyn being in No 10. Thus, by the time of May’s almost unwatchable speech announcing a council house-building programme, it felt logical to ask: if he’s so appalling, why are your only memorable policies ones you’ve nicked off him (or, in the case of the energy cap, off Ed Miliband)? Forgive me, that’s unfair. May had raised the curtain on conference with a promise of a “revolution in tuition fees”, which turned out to be keeping them at the same level. Chris Grayling announced “a revolution in rail ticketing”, which turned out to be the chance to get your season ticket on your smartphone. The key revolution seemed to be in the definition of the word “revolution”.
Other malarial moments? No one could fail to salute whichever Tory brain judged that this already toxic conference would benefit from issuing a guest pass to Katie Hopkins. It’s akin to surveying survivors of the Lusitania and thinking: you know what would really lift the spirits round here? A visit from Typhoid Mary. For reasons I briefly considered looking up, Katie had got herself up in a full wedding dress for her turn at a fringe event. All that effort and still only the second most irksome and publicity-crazed blond at conference.
And so, without delay, to wantaway foreign secretary Boris Johnson, the blond black hole, whose gravitational pull is such that nothing here could resist it. He’s not so much a cabinet minister as an event horizon.
Almost entirely because of Boris, the Tories now resemble a franchise of the reality-TV show Real Housewives: a cast of behaviourally incontinent people with zero idea of how to act when people are looking at them, with the most ambitious star seemingly having decided that conflict is winsome. Boris’s May-undermining Sun interview on the eve of conference was the intellectual equivalent of pouring a whisky sour over the head of someone called Cristee, yet was analysed as though it were one of Talleyrand’s more complex gambits. According to what one cabinet minister told the FT: “Boris’s own psychology is a matter of infinite fascination.” Only to Boris, surely. For the rest of us, a one-word diagnosis always suffices. Having said that, two-word analyses were not in short supply. According to various ministerial briefings, these ran the full gamut from “vain tit” to “fat fucker”.
The general consensus was that Boris actively wanted to be sacked: a political version of suicide-by-cop. It’s a little flattering to him, but after this week we must finally accept that Johnson is the Tories’ Raoul Moat. Like Moat’s story, Boris’s will eventually end the way it was always going to end; it’s just a question of how many people/economic regions/diplomatic relationships he takes down with him on the way.
Over the course of the conference, I heard several former loyalists advancing the theory that their former darling had finally gone too far. And by the time Boris was answering a Newsnight query as to where the “red lines” row had come from with a “search me, guv!”, it was hard not to be reminded of Sharon Stone down the cop shop in Basic Instinct. As that earlier exhibitionist reasons: “I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill someone the way I described it in my book.” Yup, well. SPOILERS.
Even so, the foreign secretary’s confidence did seem to have been slightly dampened by the time he got to his speech, which leaned less heavily than usual on a rhetorical style best summarised as: “Let me impregnate you with my word-seed.” Consider its rather wan conclusion: “We are not the lion. We do not claim to be the lion. That role is played by the people of this country. But it is up to us now – in the traditional non-threatening, genial and self-deprecating way of the British – to let that lion roar.” As Steven Seagal is forced to enquire in Under Siege: “What kind of babbling bullshit is this?”
The only possible satisfaction to be gleaned was in imagining Johnson’s reaction to being eclipsed on the fringe by Jacob Rees-Mogg – that bumptious squit from F block, in the parlance of their school. Moggmania is clearly a midsummer night’s Downton wank from which the party should have awoken by now, but it was all the rage in Manchester. To see the queues outside the North East Somerset MP’s events and the party members running after him in the street for selfies was to picture Boris somewhere across town, smashing his magic mirror and preparing a poisoned apple.
For his part, Rees-Mogg turned in various scenery-chewing performances at no fewer than nine fringe meetings. He is now at that stage in an overexposed starlet’s career when they’ve got four independent films in pre-production and have just made the gatefold cover of Vanity Fair’s Young Hollywood issue. To couch this in terms Rees-Mogg would instinctively understand: let’s hope it doesn’t all go Mischa Barton from here. As far as that other rising star goes, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson mostly stayed well out of it bar her speech on opening day, possibly concerned that too much fraternisation with colleagues from south of the border might result in her catching total inadequacy.
Was there any light relief at the conference centre? Well, there was a massage tent in the shape of a cloud, sponsored “lounges”, and a retail area known as “the maker’s market”. This amounted to various opportunities to buy pashminas, terrible art and plenty of scented candles.
Unfortunately, there was nothing on sale to mask the stench of “natural wastage”, which seems to be the Tories’ euphemism of choice for the fact that the average age of their members is around the 70 mark. “The truth is we’ve all been caught rather blindsided by this,” confessed George Freeman, chairman of the PM’s policy board. And yet, looking back, perhaps there was the odd clue that this sort of reckoning was in the post. The endless giveaways to baby boomers. The pollsters who used to cheerfully explain that the only demographic one needed to pay less attention to than young people was dead people. The sense among the constituency associations that Iain Duncan Smith was a nice young man.
Either way, the party does now seem to have become aware that it has a couple of problems with young voters. The first problem is that it doesn’t have any, and the second is that the definition of young stretches to anything under 48. This made the thrice-hourly cautionary reminders of the 1970s from the likes of Philip Hammond seem rather exposing. At this rate, the Tories might have to accept the inconvenient affront that even some people who can remember the Winter of Discontent prefer Jeremy Corbyn to them.
And yet … it must be must be said that for all their wanton ineptitude, and at times grotesque dysfunction, the Tories are still polling around 40%. Meanwhile, at the last count by YouGov – the firm that called the election most accurately - Theresa May led Jeremy Corbyn by eight points on who would make the best prime minister.
Each party – even given their occasionally radioactive levels of self-regard – must be privately gripped by one question: how the hell are we not thrashing this lot? Behind closed doors, both sides must surely be experiencing something of the sensation that has memorably attended various England football internationals down the years. Namely: “How is it possible we’re 1-0 down/only 1-0 up to a ski resort/country with the population of Bristol?”
At moments such as these, most England fans know all too well what that says about their side. Yet neither the Tories nor Labour – both of which can’t wait to tell you how historically useless the other lot are – seem dimly aware what their failure to put themselves comfortably ahead against that kind of adversary says about them.
Consider how each has characterised the other. Do the Tories wonder in private: “How is it possible we’re not 6-0 up against Venezuela’s commie king-over-the-water? What does that say about us?” Do Labour wonder in private: “How is it possible we’re not 6-0 up against this empty-of-ideas, toddler’s telenovela of a government after seven long years of austerity? What does that say about us?”
The numbers suggest that at present Labour and the Conservatives are not far from evenly matched, while each side openly professes themselves the natural party of government. Yet, without wishing to go out on a limb here, we might hesitate to characterise them as what is known in fiction as “worthy foes”. You know the sort of thing – they’re such class acts that when they meet in battle, one adversary might break off momentarily to compliment the other’s swordsmanship and say what a shame it is that they’re going to have to kill them.
No, as conference season draws to a close, it feels a stretch to imagine we are watching two equally formidable adversaries grappling at the Reichenbach Falls. Two drunks fighting in a puddle feels more like it. We might get a clear victor, we might not. But let’s not be deluded as to the quality of the spectacle.