Heard the one about Labour’s meat tax? The Conservatives really hope you have…

Could anyone have predicted that the defining catchphrase of Conservative Party Conference 2023 would be: “That’s not a meat tax”?

It’s a really catchy one, too, and with all sorts of uses. There is almost nothing you can’t point at and say “That’s not a meat tax”. Try it right now if you like. Have a look around you and whatever leaps out, give it a little look of disbelief and say  “That’s not a meat tax”. Now do something else. After three or four goes, it starts to take on a real musical quality. That’s not a meat tax. That’s not a meat tax. That’s not a meat tax. Before you know it, you really can’t stop.

For all this, you have energy secretary Claire Coutinho to thank, a “rising star” of the Conservative Party apparently, though her ascent to the glittering firmament has been temporarily halted by her having made a truly cosmic wally of herself live on Sky News.

Sophy Ridge had the temerity to ask her why it was that she had said, in her official conference speech, “It’s no wonder that Labour seem so relaxed about taxing meat, Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t eat it”, given that no one from the Labour Party has ever at any point breathed a word about introducing any kind of meat tax.

Which presented Ms Coutinho with a real challenge. Her lips moved, sounds emerged, but they failed to drown out the almost audible clanking of the gears behind her eyes as she struggled with ever-increasing desperation to describe as a meat tax things that were quite clearly not a meat tax.

It was almost biblical. “Well, there’s the Ulez expansion,” she said. The Ulez expansion is a tax on airborne particulates from old diesel cars. Jesus himself never actually dared anything more ambitious than turning water into wine. And yet here was an extremely middle-ranking politician, seeming to believe she could turn nitrogen dioxide into sirloin steak.

“There’s the proposal to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030,” she carried on. That is not merely not a tax on meat, it’s not a tax on anything at all.

The one thing she did manage to transform was a Sky News presenter into a passable rapper, as Sophy Ridge sat there in disbelief just repeating, “That’s not a meat tax, that’s not a meat tax, that’s not a meat tax”, over and over again, with such metronomic rhythm that you could set the clip over the top of “Follow the Leader” by the Soca Boys and you’d have a viral hit on your hands.

The absurdity of that particular moment reveals an essential truth of the four-day event. It has felt like chaos from beginning to end, but it might be less mad than it feels. Coutinho is absolutely by no means the first or last person to accuse the Labour Party of doing or saying something it has absolutely never done. And the Labour Party, whether it likes it or not, is going to have to spend a fair chunk of its own conference digging its way out from under the great mountain of excrement that’s been heaped on top of it.

We’ve had Andrew Bowie MP, going on the radio repeating the entirely deranged conspiracy theory that Labour is going to make people live in “15-minute cities” where they’re only allowed to go shopping on certain days.

James Cleverly reckons the Falklands won’t be safe under Labour. Complete garbage.

The Conservative mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, reckons London’s Jews don’t feel safe under Sadiq Khan, a comment so deranged that the Labour Party hasn’t even needed to say anything about it, because the Jewish Board of Deputies have taken it upon themselves to say that, actually, they’re fine, thanks, and what is this mad person going on about?

The trouble is, does this stuff work? Some of us can still remember 2016, when David Cameron and co spent so long having to explain that Turkey wasn’t going to join the EU, and that there wouldn’t be £350m a week for the NHS, that they actually convinced people that both things must be true.

The entire conference has been completely overshadowed by Rishi Sunak claiming to be “taking my time” over the decision about whether or not to scrap the Manchester leg of HS2, when what he actually wants is to not say anything about it until he announces it in his conference speech, which he certainly will do on Wednesday.

And that has a sort of perverse quality, too. He knows that it will mean the Labour Party will now have to say whether or not it wants to “unscrap” HS2, and if it does, then where will it find the £50bn he’s just saved?

He knows he’ll talk about taking “long-term decisions for a brighter future” – the slogan that’s all over the walls in Manchester, when what he’s actually doing is taking the most short-term ones he can possibly manage, to make life as hard as he can for an opposition that hardly needs to worry about a thing he says.

Half of his own side don’t care either. They’re far too busy fighting to replace him. Suella Braverman waltzed on stage to announce that “the Labour Party doesn’t believe in controlling our borders”. To which the Labour Party might want to point out that net immigration was half a million last year, and they’ve not been in charge of the borders for quite some time.

She is now the party’s established master of objectionable politics. She spoke of the coming “hurricane” of migration. She called the Human Right Act the “criminal rights act”. And she also had the brass neck to read out those famous Shelley lines.

“Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number – Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.”

This, it hardly needs to be said, is the Labour Party’s secular scripture, which she was, she said, “reclaiming”. It was brave politics, but it is unlikely to survive contact with the electorate next year, when Braverman and her chums are going to be very few indeed.