Those of us who arrived at the Birmingham ICC fearing we would find ourselves participating in the funeral rites of a once great party are pleasantly surprised.
The atmosphere on the first afternoon of the Conservative Party Conference is convivial, even optimistic. Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow from 2010-2024, whom we encountered on his mobility scooter, observed that the mood is “much jollier than last year”.
He recalled that “last year was like a wake, you just knew it was impending doom, we were just waiting for the guillotine basically”.
This year, the guillotine has fallen, but the party is still alive, there seem to be plenty of members about and the conference is enlivened by the race for the leadership, which has suddenly become frantic.
Within three minutes of entering the ICC, we spotted Kemi Badenoch, smiling, self-possessed and somewhat shorter in stature than one expects from her photographs, hastening first in one direction and then a moment later in the other, for her team had taken a wrong turn, an easy thing to do in the bizarre assortment of balconies, staircases and halls on different levels which make up the conference centre.
Jane Edwards, a member from Chelmsford, declared her support for Badenoch: “I think she’s got a touch of the Mrs T’s. She’s able to say the things that pale, stale men cannot say.”
Your correspondent admitted being less fearless than Badenoch.
And here was Tom Tugendhat, the former soldier, moving at incredible speed with a band of half a dozen crack troops towards his next objective. He shouted a cheery greeting, feared this might seem offhand, so turned his head and expressed astonishment that ConHome’s correspondent has not yet been made a peer.
“They’re going so fast because they’re worried about IEDs,” a wag remarked. “What they don’t realise is the real danger is from the microphones which are picking up every word they say.”
Robert Jenrick declared at a fringe meeting organised by the Centre for Policy Studies: “I am unashamedly provincial…I’m proud to be from the Midlands.”
He is reckoned to be within striking distance of the 40 MPs needed to become one of the final two candidates who will be presented to the membership.
If this is true, it means the other three candidates are fighting each other for the other spot. Around whom will support solidify, and from whom, including Jenrick, will support drain away? “It’s an open race,” the most prudent students of the Tory turf observe.
Jenrick said the failure to proceed with housing reform was “the biggest single mistake” of the last Conservative government.
On the short walk from Birmingham New Street station to the ICC one can admire magnificent 19th-century architecture and lament the blots on the landscape erected since the Second World War – see above a picture of the Town Hall, opened in 1834, with Queen Victoria averting her eyes from the cranes on the skyline.
Shoddy post-war buildings help explain why people are so suspicious of new development. The media are asked to enter the ICC via a rabbit warren of subterranean, or at any rate windowless, passages which bring the phrase “dystopian nightmare” to mind.
But here was Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands from 2017-2024 and Birmingham resident, to welcome us from the main stage and assure us that “all the cranes on the skyline are indeed shaping a new city”. He said that visitors either tell him, “You know what, it’s better than I expected,” or else observe, “It’ll be great when it’s finished.”
He was followed by Richard Fuller, the Party Chairman, who apologised to Tory members for the “self-seeking and self-indulgent” behaviour of Tory MPs in the last Parliament.
Tory spirits have been raised in the last month by the unexpected speed with which Labour has got into difficulties. Shazna Muzammil, Conservative candidate for Birmingham Ladywood at the general election and leader of the Conservative group on Milton Keynes Council, caught the mood of the conference when she declared from the main stage: “Anyone who says the Labour victory was deep, they need the donor to buy them some stronger glasses.”
