I’ve just attended an off-camera briefing at CCHQ (the Pankhurst Room) about the Party Conference. Here are the main points: Accreditation: All passes (except very late applications) have been cleared by the Lancashire Constabulary. Phew. More than 8,500 passes have been issued – the best attendance for five years. Slogan: "It’s time for change" is […]
By demoralising the Thatcher-hating core Labour vote Baroness Thatcher’s afternoon tea at No.10 may well cause more long-term damage to Brown than to Cameron, although I doubt that that was in her or her advisers’ calculations. Glancing around what there is of a Labour-supporting blogosphere I see that Bloggers4Labour "can’t imagine any remotely plausible political […]
Due to diary commitments Arnold Schwarzenegger has pulled out of the keynote speech on the first day of party conference. His spokesman said he could no longer make it to the UK in person so would be giving a shorter video-link speech instead, as Sarkozy did last year. Seeing as he does head up one […]
In another major coup for David Cameron the Governor of California – Arnold Schwarzenegger – has agreed to address this year’s Blackpool Conference. There are a number of things I don’t like much about Arnie and his politics but now is not the time to rehearse those. Here are three things that we can usefully […]
Francis Maude will announce tomorrow that the Conservative Party Conference will be held in Manchester both in 2009 and 2011. This follows a trend of moving conferences to larger, more northern destinations. Spring Forum was held in Manchester last year and was generally well-liked by delegates, and we recently revealed that the next Spring Forum […]
"This afternoon I will be in Birmingham. I’m the Shadow Minister for Wolverhampton, so I’m in the West Midlands at least once a month. This time, though, there’s a difference. This time I’m taking the whole Party with me. I’m on my way to Birmingham’s International Convention Centre to announce that this is where we’ll […]
Tonight’s Birmingham Mail is reporting that a £2m subsidy has almost certainly won the 2008 Conservative Party Conference for Birmingham. Birmingham City Council – run by a Tory-LibDem coalition – apparently calculate that the wooing of the Tory conference will generate £25m for the local economy. Birmingham replaces Bournemouth after Francis Maude’s fury at last […]
I don’t think this has reached the public sphere yet, so just to let you know that next year’s Conservative Party Spring Forum is planned to be held in Gateshead (Southerners may need to consult this map). It’s some way away, but I’d suggest Liverpool as a good venue for a conference in 2009 now […]
The Atticus column in The Sunday Times suggests that Party Chairman Francis Maude has vowed not to return to Bournemouth because of the passes fiasco that blighted last October’s gathering. CCHQ is known to hold the Dorset Constabulary responsible for the long delays that ruined Conference week for hundreds of people. Atticus: "The decision will […]
The annual Tory conference has been a major drain on the party’s finances for a number of years. The party has been repeatedly advised that, if run in a different way, the spring and autumn conferences could become reasonably healthy profit centres. It is to the credit of Francis Maude and his team that they […]
Earlier this week we published the latest results from the ConservativeHome Members’ Panel. Findings included news that only 6% of Tory members think that the A-list includes the most talented candidates in the Conservative party. Here are the Panel’s September rankings of the shadow cabinet’s top ten portfolio holders and my assessment of how each […]
(1) This conference tipped the party a little closer to the balanced conservatism that ConservativeHome champions. David Cameron’s greener conservatism was on full show in Bournemouth this week but we also saw some reassurance for those conservatives who worry about crime and family breakdown. Yesterday’s news on prisons and tax relief for families was followed […]
This morning’s Telegraph reveals a number of ‘eye-catching initiatives’ that CCHQ hopes will liven up this year’s Party Conference. They include a suggest-a-policy feature that will be vetted by a panel modelled on the successful Dragon’s Den television programme. The conference theme will be A New Direction – the same headline chosen by US Democrats […]
The Independent: "Lord Tebbit, the former party chairman, who was injured with his wife, Margaret, when a Brighton conference hotel was bombed in 1984, said he would be saddened by the move. "I am sad about it because it does seem to me an attempt by the leadership to put distance between itself and the […]
Francis Maude has always been ‘the modernisers’ moderniser’. On many previous occasions – as a backbencher – he has called for the Conservative Party to look less white and less male. He has called for policy changes that show much greater respect for gay people. He has encouraged more co-operation with Liberal Democrats. That modernising […]