The queue to hear Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch face an hour each of questions was almost as long as on the glory day in 2018 when Boris Johnson filled the vast, charmless, steeply raked Hall 1 at the Birmingham ICC and put fresh hope into the 1400-strong audience that a success could yet be made of Brexit.
On Wednesday Tugendhat, Badenoch, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick will each speak here for 20 minutes, and we shall discover whether they can by force of oratory rival Johnson’s ability to make people feel good about being Conservative.
Today and tomorrow, the four contenders for the leadership are instead answering “tough questions but not gotcha questions” from the amiable Christopher Hope, Political Editor of GB News.
Two hours is far too long for such an exercise. There is a reason why Prime Minister’s Questions lasts for half an hour or just over.
Tugendhat went first. “Was he in the Army?” my neighbour inquired after a few minutes, Tugendhat having already made numerous allusions to his service in Afghanistan.
“Were you a spy?” Hope inquired.
“I was a uniformed intelligence officer,” Tugendhat replied.
“Are you a Wet, to use that Thatcherite term?” Hope wondered.
“We’re not Left or Right, we’re Conservatives,” Tugendhat retorted, which earned him spontaneous applause.
But although he gave an alert, amiable, astute performance, those of us who are inclined to feel sleepy after lunch found it increasingly difficult to stay awake.
“As leader I will always listen,” Tugendhat was promising, but seriously though Conservatives take the choice of a new leader, it became difficult for his potential followers to go on listening to him.
On came Badenoch in a brilliant pink suit. “I’m somebody who gets cut-through,” she said with a smile, leaning back in the chair in a relaxed way and gesturing much with her hands.
She worried some of us by adding that she acts “from first principles”. Surely that was one of the problems with the French Revolution?
But by this she seems to mean that she thinks things through for herself, and rejects the unexamined, vaguely leftish assumptions which inform so much journalism.
She is prepared to take the risk of saying things which may be taken amiss by reporters in search of a news line. More than that, she enjoys exploding the Today Programme view of the world.
“There is so much waffle waffle,” she said of what today passes for political debate. “They just say safe, bland words.”
Hope wondered if she would like the Conservative Party Chairman to be elected by the membership. Badenoch rejected that idea, and went on: “I don’t think the solution to everything is more and more elections.”
Wonderful to listen to a politician willing to defy democratic pieties. Badenoch is not the “safety first” candidate in this election, has indeed a capacity to pick fights which alarms some observers, but is the only candidate to show flashes of star quality.
Michael Gove had earlier compared himself, in conversation with Zoë Billingham, Director of IPPR North, to the racing driver James Hunt, who “recognised when it was time to leave the circuit”.
Hunt, it may be recalled, was known as “Hunt the Shunt”, because of his spectacular accidents. Asked why the Conservatives lost the election, Gove replied: “If there are guilty men, I’m one of the guiltiest.”
The original “Guilty Men”, blamed for Britain’s unpreparedness in 1940, included Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin.
Gove refused to back any of the candidates in the Tory leadership race, as “my endorsement would be a blight on their prospects”.
He said that succeeding Fraser Nelson as Editor of The Spectator, as he will at the end of the week, “is like taking over from Alex Ferguson at Manchester United”.
And he promised that when he succeeds to an editorship which has also been held by Nigel Lawson, Iain Macleod, Sir Ian Gilmour and Boris Johnson, he will campaign for the Conservatives to return at frequent intervals to Blackpool for their autumn conference.
“Oh I do like to be beside the seaside” used to be played on the electric organ in Blackpool to warm one up before some great figure spoke, and there is nothing like a gale blowing off the Irish Sea to revive one, as one strides from the Winter Gardens to the Imperial Hotel, from over-indulgence at the previous night’s receptions.
At the start of the day Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Chancellor and almost certainly no relation of the racing driver, warned while being interviewed on the main stage by Lord Finkelstein that “without sounding too much like Boris and having your cake and eating it, we need votes from all these groups, Liberals, Reform, the stay at homes”, and it would be wrong “to assume that those votes will all come back to us”.
