The Conservative Party is facing an electoral wipeout, and it knows it. This means that few were expecting the mood at this week’s conference to be celebratory, but early reports suggest that even glum would be underplaying it.
It took a couple of days before attendees at the National Conservatism conference earlier this year started to dwindle. The party’s conference has certainly beaten that target. Audience sizes were so small on the first day, including for senior figures like Grant Shapps and James Cleverly, that, as The Mirror revealed, “top Tories have been forced to stuff the front rows of the hall with their own aides so broadcast cameras have people in seats to cut away to during their speeches.”
Crowds appeared far more enthused, and certainly more numerous, around former UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.
This, of course, is unsurprising, given the likelihood of them saying (genuinely or otherwise) something disruptive, that would shake the Tory roots, rather than stating again the party line. Conservative Home blog founder Tim Montgomerie wrote online that Farage “got quite the reception. I’m convinced party members would choose him as leader if they could.”
Ben Habib of the Reform Party told The European Conservative that this general lack of enthusiasm illustrates “the implosion of the Conservative Party.” The presence of Farage and “jockeying” of figures like Truss, he said, shows “they’ve accepted a number of things; they’ve got a fractured party, they’re going to lose the next election, that Rishi Sunak’s going to go … [that] the next election is lost.”
Writing in The Guardian, parliamentary sketch writer John Crace said the event is
Not so much a party conference. Not even an end of the pier show. More of a funeral wake. At which most of the participants appear to have already died.
And there is more to this than what some critics would describe as typical Guardian Tory-bashing; The Spectator agrees, even if it puts it more softly, that “the mood seems muted and lacking in energy.” Sunak would need nothing short of a miracle to turn the mood around over the rest of the conference.
