Party conference season is the most pointless waste of money, time and liver quality ever devised. I attended these sweaty, drunken gatherings for ten years during my newspaper-editor days and achieved nothing constructive other than clarity over which is the best way to treat a monstrous hangover. (Answer: my late grandmother’s recipe of vine tomatoes on toast, laden with thick Marmite and gargantuan grinds from a pepper mill.) But they were fun, so long as I adhered to the golden rule: always leave the bar before 2 a.m., thus avoiding the moment when enough alcohol emboldens other delegates, and indeed one’s own staff, to tell you what they really think of you.
Politicians use their conferences to plot, scheme, shore up support and remind us all that they’re a bunch of self-interested charlatans. I recall dinner with newly appointed home secretary Jack Straw during the 1997 Brighton gathering, where I asked what he would do about Moors murderer Myra Hindley, whose parole was being considered. ‘Officially, I fully intend to afford her the same rights as any other prisoner in Britain,’ he replied. Then he smirked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. ‘Unofficially, if you think I’m going down as the home secretary who released Myra Hindley, then you must be fucking joking!’
The dreaded conference hall, devoid of functional air-conditioning and featuring an interminable roster of dreary speakers, is best avoided. I had far more entertainment off-piste. There was the annual Daily Mirror lunch with the Blairs, where Cherie’s behaviour towards me depended on how she viewed my conduct in the preceding year. She was friendliest just after I’d declined to publish topless paparazzi photos of her on a beach. ‘My heroic knight in shining armour!’ she gushed when we sat down.
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