Anybody who has had the misfortune to be sent to a Tory party conference for work knows that if you want to discover what’s really going on behind the scenes you must avoid the big dull speeches in the main halls like the plague.
Instead, you have to sneak an invite to late-night secret parties held in private rooms at the grand hotels where the top dogs are staying. That’s where the real power games are played out between the politicians vying for position and the money men plotting their next move.
Occasionally, it’s worth dropping by to listen in on the fringe events in case an ambitious MP goes off piste and says something outrageous. Usually, though, they are deadly boring; it’s where the blue-sky thinking think tank wonks do their heavy lifting and earn their keep.
Another good place to catch gossip is outside the hotel foyers where the eager young spads and wannabe Tory MPs, dressed almost identically in plasticky mid-blue suits and skinny ties, congregate like sardines in a tin to smoke and drink when they have been kicked out of the bars at around 1am.
Not this year. This year you didn’t need to sneak into the private parties or hang outside in the cold to find out what was going on. Watching TV from the comfort of your sofa was actually the best place to see the goings-on. There was no hiding this time as the politicians jostling to succeed Rishi Sunak were jockeying for power right there in full technicolour centre-stage.
Even more fascinating to see was that the next leadership race is completely dominated by the Conservative party’s top women: seven of them at the latest tally. While the central hall was almost empty for mainstream speeches by the so-called big beasts like James Cleverly, it was the fringe events like that held by Liz Truss which had the longest crocodile style queues and a crammed packed room of MPs and observers wanting to listen to her plans for growth and productivity.
Who wants to listen to Jeremy Hunt drone on about the impossibility of cutting taxes – or Sunak parrot that by cutting inflation he is cutting taxes – when Truss stirs the more visceral Tory appetite with her promises of sunny uplands by slashing corporation tax?
It’s an extraordinary about-turn for the former Prime Minister, who has been demonised by everybody – most viciously by her own party – for holding precisely those same policies that she espoused while in office a year ago, and for which she was booted out.
Yet remarkably, the only meaty and controversial challenges to party policy – and indeed to Labour ideology – came from the Tory women, five of whom hold ministerial office.
As well as Truss, they are the always outspoken Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, the always on manoeuvres, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, Claire Coutinho, the novice but clearly aspiring energy secretary, Michelle Donelan, the science secretary, Gillian Keegan, the accident prone education secretary , and although she’s more of an outsider, backbencher Miriam Cates, should be thrown into the mix. Some say Priti Patel should be included in those chasing the crown but she’s too much like marmite for most people’s taste.
Even more outspoken than usual, Badenoch accused Labour of peddling ‘a narrative of hopelessness’ about ethnic minority communities. Perhaps the party’s fiercest anti-identity and woke warrior, she proclaimed that Britain is the best country in the world to be black – “because it’s a country that sees people not labels.” She wasn’t playing to the gallery either: it’s a view she has held consistently since becoming an MP six years ago.
The newly appointed Coutinho took aim at the net zero zealots and their “religion” although she made hash of her warning about meat taxes, Donelan took on trans extremism, promising to reverse the “denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness” within the public sector while Keegan is to ban distracting mobile phones in classrooms. All big and bold stuff.
Cates is one to watch. Her support for the family – of whatever form – has earned her the most astonishing vitriol from some quarters. Yet she keeps going with her belief that the family is the building block of conservatism, one that helps foster the most stable next generation and which should be recognised in the tax system. (She’s right on that.)
At a fringe event, Cates even went as far as suggesting the bishops should stop interfering in politics and get back to their day job of underpinning traditional social values – and help do so by not charging couples for marriage. Just wait to hear what the church has to say about that.
Penny Mordaunt, who came close to winning the last leadership race, was also on top form attacking Labour’s Keir Starmer for cowardice, while defending the Conservatives as the party which has transformed the “sick man of Europe into a titan on the global stage” and broken the chokehold of militant unions on the country. In a speech mentioning Thatcher, Tebbit and Churchill, the leader of the Commons claimed that Starmer would drag the country back to the 1980s, and that he was still in thrall to the unions like the British Medical Association which appears to have replaced the National Union of Mineworkers with its militancy.
What’s more, Mordaunt, whose sword-carrying during the coronation has left its mark on so many, was brave enough to admit that the Conservatives have the “fight of our lives” on their hands, and must do all they can to stand up against the “decliners and the despite-Brexiters.” Punchy talk.
Watching these Tory women politicians go for the gullet of some of the toughest problems facing the country has been compelling. Whether you agree with them or not, what they all showed is how willing they are to debate some of the thorniest economic and social issues facing the country today which so many of the Conservative parliamentary party are too weedy to challenge. Or worse, dare not to.
It would be fatuous to claim there is a direct link between the fact that they are female and proving to be bolder and braver than their male counterparts. The best one can suggest is that they are a particularly bright and bloody-minded gang, an outcome which shows that if it’s good at anything, the Tory party allows women to succeed to the highest positions without any quotas or diversity nonsense.
Or perhaps the women are rising so fast to the top because the Tory men are simply exhausted after 13 years of making such a mess of government? Or are they too busy looking for new jobs for when they lose their seats? Whatever the reason, it is fair to say it’s the women who are showing they have balls as well as brains.
Ironically, the only male politician to attract anywhere near as much of the limelight as the seven Tory sisters was one Nigel Farage. Present at the conference for the first time in years as a GB News commentator, he turned out to be one of the star attractions, mainly because of his dancing skills. The clip of him fist pumping with Priti Patel to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” at one of the after-parties will go down in the history as one of the weirdest moments of any party conference ever.
Yet the return of Farage centre-stage to the Tory conference shows his pulling power is not over. Whether he attempts another come-back or not as an MP, it looks increasingly as though he will be one of the kingmakers if and when the party does splinter after the next election. Or maybe that should be queenmaker?
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