After Nigel Farage and Liz Truss stole the show yesterday leaving Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in the dust, the headline speeches had to take it up a notch today. And in some sense they did. Today was the day that the Tory Conference (explicitly) took on the culture wars.Â
Health Secretary Steve Barclay announced that trans women would no longer be allowed access to female-only wards in hospitals. Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who spoke later in the day, backed Barclay up to broadcasters, saying that trans women “have no place in women’s wards”.
Braverman’s speech was greeted with an ovation and a lot of clapping, crowning her (as The Sun’s political editor Harry Cole put it) as queen of conference. That is ominous for moderates who fear Braverman becoming leader after a general election defeat.
Elsewhere, Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove spoke less about levelling up and more about how the Tories were apparently the party of all honourable things in life while Labour were quite the opposite. He labelled Sir Keir Starmer the “jellyfish of British politics. He is transparent, spineless and swept along by the tide.” He also gestured to the infamous promise made in 2016 by the Leave campaign of £350 million a week for the NHS: “Promise made, promise delivered”.
Justice Secretary Alex Chalk took the opportunity to point out that Britain had been Ukraine’s first ally and was committed to justice for Russia’s invasion – we’ll remind him of that if and when we get to the negotiations. Rolling out the largest prison expansion since the Victorian era. Chalk also had a dig at Starmer: “He reminds me of a kind of living cushion: he just bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”
It was the Home Secretary’s pitch that got most of the attention, though.
Braverman spoke of a “hurricane” coming in terms of increased global migration.
She also spoke about why she listens to her critics in order to improve and claimed this year Tory conference is about the party “raising its game”, which wouldn’t be hard after last year’s farce when Truss was PM.
Labour sees Braverman as a very useful target, believing her rhetoric and record alienate moderate voters.
The opposition pointed to Home Office figures indicating that 1,037 people had landed on British soil from small boat crossings since the beginning of Conference on Sunday.
Braverman said in her speech: “We will do whatever it takes to stop the boats and deter bogus asylum seekers.”
Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader and now GB News presenter, was unimpressed. Asked if he would rejoin the Tories, he told reporters he wouldn’t even vote for them, never mind become a member.
On the fringe, Lord Frost donned a cowboy stetson hat for his Ronald Reagan impression. Not quite the Farage and Truss showstopper, but it added to the surreal atmosphere in Manchester.
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