I have to say that I found this year’s Conservative Party conference a little lacklustre. I realise this was sort of the whole point — the “no triumphalism” ordinance and the champagne ban were part of a conscious effort to keep the conference low key, But I do wonder whether the Tory high command overdid it. I came away from Manchester with the distinct impression that we were about to get a Tory government by default.
To be fair I left before David Cameron’s set-piece speech, but the real temperature of a party conference is always taken away from the conference platform: at the fringes, in the bars and in the snatched conversations in between. The Tories are beginning to get a policy agenda together, but it is still fragmented and lacking in a binding vision.
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