What really happened away from the cameras at the Labour Party conference?

After last year’s virtual meet-up, the Labour Party conference returned in full last week. The opposition party did not hold a meeting by the sea 12 months ago because of the pandemic, but with mass events back on the menu, this year they properly got into the swing of things.

Labour conferences are usually a strange experience at the best of times: scruffily earnest activists of all ages rub shoulders with people you recognise off the telly and even more people who wish you recognised them off the telly.

The festivities lasted from Saturday until Wednesday afternoon. I use the word festivities because that is what the conference largely is. If you take only a passing interest in politics you may not realise that you see the driest part of the conference on the news: the votes and speeches. But there is a large underbelly to conference that is, well, mostly drinking: at sponsored receptions and parties, or just pubs on the fringe where you can catch up with political friends you only see once a year.

This year’s gathering, held in Brighton, was particularly strange because it was probably the first indoor mass event most people there had attended for at least 18 months. In fact, torrential rain ensured that it was probably more indoors than usual, with anyone venturing outside regularly swept back in again by the seaside town’s gale-force winds.

The conference, and the Tory one which kicks off this weekend, will be an excellent test of whether we’ve done enough to suppress Covid-19. What took place in Brighton would, six months ago, without question have been referred to as a super-spreader event.

The most prominent bar inside the conference secure zone, the one belonging to the Hilton hotel, regularly had a queue for drinks at least six people deep. The room took several minutes to walk across because of the density of people – and it is not a particularly large room. There were very few masks because most people were drinking and trying to talk and be heard in a loud, crowded space.

Slightly worryingly, there is a running joke in Westminster that everyone usually comes back from the event with “conference flu”. This is not just due to all the drinking but because whatever illnesses are doing the rounds in every part of the country tend to congregate in poorly ventilated rooms for half a week along with the activists, and then return to their constituencies with them.

Perhaps I’m being slightly alarmist here: there’s a good chance that with vaccines, contact tracing and everything else we’ve done to suppress the virus, it will all be fine. But it will certainly be an interesting data point: hopefully conference flu won’t turn into conference Covid.

Yours,

Jon Stone

Policy correspondent