I HATE PARTY CONFERENCES. They have burned away a significant portion of my time on this earth. Every year since 2001, with only the break provided by Covid-19 for relief, I’ve attended at least two and generally three conferences. At between three and five days for each one, that’s more than 200 days and about 100 nights’ of sleep. That’s more than six months. Muggers do less time than that, or used to in the days when the police tried to catch them.
Hating conference is a performative status ritual of Westminster life. It’s a way of parading your vast experience of the political scene, showing off a sophisticate’s jaded appetites for the things lesser dwellers in the SW1A village find important and interesting. It’s also a good way to argue that things aren’t as good as they used to be.
Conferences really aren’t though. They’ve changed, meaning conference-hating has changed too. The most important change came in the days of Tony Blair. In 2006, Blair’s last conference as Labour
