At a Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, I saw the light

Political party conferences are not for the faint of heart. If this year’s remote alternatives lacked any sense of dynamism – for participants and onlookers alike – then at least they saved a few attendees’ livers from undue punishment.

It may be, of course, that in the years since Twitter emerged to tell tales in real time, party conferences have been dulled by the fear of exposure: the heaviest carousing may be a thing of the past. But the cringing networking and the Machiavellian positioning can surely be no less rampant.

In the early to mid-2000s, I went to five or six party conferences over three or four years. Each time there were the same minor bugbears: the bureaucratic security; the outrageous price-hikes at every hotel in town; the smug way everyone talked about being “at conference”, as if it were a place in itself.

I was there for the same reason almost everyone – aside from actual party members – was there: to see and be seen; to have coffee meetings in hotel lobbies which, for the most part, I could just as easily have arranged to have in London; to ensure I asked a question at a vaguely relevant fringe event; and, in the evenings, to drink wine – ideally that someone else had paid for – at a variety of venues inside the security cordon.

It was – and by all accounts still is – in the bars that the real business happens, not the conference hall, which only really comes alive for the party leader’s speech. But it is also in the bars you come to realise that you must be a real political animal to thrive in this world. I wasn’t one.

One by one, I ticked off the classic party conference venues: Bournemouth, Brighton, Blackpool – plus Manchester. I saw Billy Bragg sing in a bar at a Labour bash; I put my head in at a disco for the Young Conservatives (and left quite quickly); I saw politicians form alliances in quiet corners of upmarket restaurants. It was fun to witness, but ultimately hollowing.

I can’t remember whether it was 2005 or 2007 that I went to the Tories’ event in Blackpool. No policy announcements stick in the memory. I recall finding an excuse to bimble off so I could glance at the Tower Ballroom, which had entered public consciousness as the venue for Strictly Come Dancing’s occasional visits to the north. It was interesting enough – but I was really just killing time, hoping I might bump into someone I vaguely knew so I could justify my existence in the town.

I recall too, walking alone along the jaded promenade towards the end of one afternoon – between “meetings”, bereft of purpose, feeling no desire whatsoever for being in this place. Ahead of me was Blackpool Tower and the rollercoasters of the pleasure beach; trams rumbled along the front. The tourist trade had been in decline for decades and was slow in this early autumn, but the town was benefitting from the mini-boom of conference season.

On my left I a saw a rack of vending machines – the kind of thing you put twenty pence into and turn a handle for a smattering of jellybeans. One was selling crotchless panties for two quid. Chilly for the time of year, I thought, wondering who the target customer was. Conservative MPs?

My instinct that gloomy day was to decry the general shabbiness of the town, to wonder why anyone would come to a seaside resort which appeared to have its best days long behind it, and which was apparently marketing itself as a destination for the kind of cheap thrill summed up by skimpy, disposable underwear.

Yet not far away was one half of the country’s political elite, not to mention representatives of any big corporation you might care to mention, cosseted in the conference bubble – in Blackpool, but not really seeing it. And these were the same class of people who had the power to arrest the region’s decline. Would their gut feeling about the town be the same as mine? Was I, in fact, part of their gang after all? I recoiled at the possibility and swore against it.

In the intervening years, the great debate about elites and experts – and their interest or otherwise in the lot of the common man and woman – has been thrashed out noisily, messily, but to nobody’s obvious advantage, except perhaps the elites who now pose as anti-elites. For all the energy expended, there has been little in the way of illumination. Perhaps it’s to be found in Blackpool, a place where I saw the light.