Barely democratic, cosy to the point of corruption with votes discreetly fixed: What party conferences are really like, by QUENTIN LETTS By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail Published: 01:39, 16 September 2024 | Updated: 01:50, 16 September 2024 e-mail View comments As summer fades, you see them on telephone wires, birds of a feather preparing for the autumn journey. Quarrelsome blackcaps head for Iberia and the Manx shearwater girds its wings for the haul to South America. And each September that oddest of specimens, the politics warbler, enters a first-class railway carriage and flutters off to some four-star hotel for the nutrition-rich wetlands of the party conferences.
Every year it happens, regular as the tock of a grandfather clock. Parliament adjourns, as it did last Thursday, and for three weeks our political class ups sticks to a provincial destination for some all-expenses-paid nesting. Behind high-security barricades they schmooze, chirp and fill their beaks during long, splashy evenings.
Shortly before Sir Keir Starmer spoke to the conference, I saw a middle-aged bloke stagger bleary-eyed out of the hall, Quentin Letts writes Lobbyists palm business cards to rising politicians. Ministers murmur over canapes with construction sector tycoons and technology tyros. Trade union barons disappear into private dining rooms with Downing Street tsars and think-tank directors.
Pledges of mutual assistance are signalled, donations made. Out on the conference hall floor, meanw.