Party Conference Animals

In the UK, the main Political Parties' Conference season is over again. And what piles of pointless flummery they all turned out to be.

Whether it was some desperate Liberal Democrats attempting to convice that they really are making a difference; an equally desperate bunch of Labour wonks trying to forget the monumental disaster that was "The Brown Years" or the Conservative cabal tinkering around the edges of policy-making in order to appear "in touch"...they all had one one thing in common. They were talking to themselves, and certainly not to us. 

In fairness, that's what conferences are. (n. 1. a formal meeting of people with a shared interest, typically taking place over several days.) It's only because the main three party conferences happen to involve the people who purport to run government or those who have the best chance of undermining it, that they become newsworthy. Otherwise, we'd have blanket day-time TV coverage of the annual conferences of the National Association of Estate Agents or The Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists.



Mr  Cable leaves the stage to rapturous silence

The chosen locations for conferencing this year were Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool - the triangle of wannabe alternate English capital cities - the three parties having eschewed the traditional draws of the Bournemouths, Blackpools and Brightons in favour of something a little more hard-bitten and gritty, seeing as we find ourselves in an increasingly hard-bitten and gritty state. And it wouldn't do for Nick, Dave or that bloke that Labour stupidly voted in as their leader instead of his brother, to be seen walking along the seaside promenade with an ice cream in these dark and worrying times. 

Tracey Crouch MP explains the offside 
rule to George Osborne - along with why
the UK Economy is totally fucked

In the past, much has been made of the conference reactions to the addresses given by the leadership of the parties. How long did so-and-so get for his standing ovation? Which leader got the most applause for a policy change? This time around, commentators were counting the empty seats (even at the keynote speech of the Prime Minister); counting how many delegates fell asleep during Osborne's detail-free faux-polemic on the state of the national and world economies; making up statistics on the age profile of Lib Dems, or taking as many photographs as they could of Ed Balls's wobbly gut and Rooney-like aggression on the football field against the hacks. Even the Tories' football match against the journos gained a headline due to the Party of government's decision to field an ineligible player. FA rules weirdly ban females aged over thirteen from playing in mixed sex teams but the Tories had Tracey Crouch MP in the squad. Dave has announced that he wants to change this old-fashioned and sexist FA regulation as part of the effort to get women back into the Tory voting habit. A further result of the rule change could be that, with a little bit of coaching and a huge fee from Sky, Harry Redknapp can sign the deliciously untalented Cheryl Cole in advance of Spurs' next game against Chelsea, where she would have the opportunity to kick the living shit out her estranged "love rat" of a husband before being red-carded.



Conference Delegates Discuss the Wrong Thing

Even the BBC have become bored and have announced that Newsnight will no longer cover the conferences "live". It was also pretty clear from the faces, attitudes and even the questions of the leading television journalists, that the conferences lacked a certain something. And that certain something happened to be the Elephant in the Room that is Global Economic Meltdown. While the politicians postured and their floppy-haired assistants ran around the halls with their i-phones stapled to their ears, there was a sense that it was all so utterly pointless. A policy twist here, an invective-laden attack on the government there, but no real sense of what it was anyone could actually do about the undeniable fact that, within a few years, China and India will own anything and everything that might be left.

There wasn't even a hint of a scandal to lighten the journalistic moods. Nothing like previous conferences where rumours abounded about who was sneaking down an hotel corridor to in the dead of night to tap on the door of whom like the Howard / Varsi story that was squashed so vigourously a few years ago. Where was William's little friend? The papers had to make do with the old standards like Theresa May's kitten heels that gave them punnable headlines for the spat with Ken Clarke over the asylim-seeker's pet cat and, of course, the gratuitous photographs of SamCam's outfit and an equally gratuitous product placement for the lucky retailer. And even Boris was subdued.

In the end, all we had left was the fast-disappearing memory of the worst leader's address at a Labour conference since...well, since the last one. Ed Miliband is nothing short of unelectably strange. He karate-chopped his way through a list of platitudinous crap for about an hour. He stated the bleeding obvious again and again as he attempted to Trot[sic] out his "New Bargain", that the conference soon realised could be bettered at Lidl. "I'm not Tony Blair!" he announced, sounding very much like Tony Blair, before whispering conspiratorially, just in case anyone might believe it, that he wasn't Gordon Brown, either. Dave, on the other hand, decided that the Tories were clever enough to have worked out for themselves that he wasn't Maggie but she was worth a mention and some gratitude for past endeavours in Tory Leaderhsip, as were Major, Howard and even Hague in the same breath. It would have been a stretch to include Heath, McMillan or Eden and Dave wisely left out Churchill from the list.



"Dave" TV: Giraffe in the Conference Room?

Ed's slightly older and inestimably brighter, more charismatic and, critically, electable brother must be counting the days down to the moment that the Labour Party sees sense and gives him the job. Then, when David Laws has been forgiven for trying to cover up being gay and takes over from Nick, all the three main parties will be run by a "Dave", just in time for the BBC, Sky and ITV to give up on the conferences altogether and the rights to coverage are granted exclusively to the channel of the same name...inbetween re-runs of HIGNFY and QI. Probably where it belongs....but as "Dave" professes to be "The Home of Witty Banter", then there's a massive cultural gap to be breached first...