The Tory conference made me feel like Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral

Hugo Rifkind on the party conference season

Are we sure that party conferences are good things? Are we convinced that they do the job? Certainly, they are great fun. That, I would never dispute. The booze. The talk. And the rooms. Any connoisseur of weird, shabby, out-of-town hotels with ominously crumbly ceilings and carpets that suck would have been thrilled by my temporary berth in Blackpool last week. Five damp beds in my room for one, and two cold taps that only ran hot. An actual karaoke bar, through which I had to pass to get in and out. The ever-present smell of cigarettes and that other familiar tang which, after two days and with some surprise, I finally recognised as the smell of the London Zoo elephant pen. Oh, it was all very special.

I would have written about it at the time, but I heard an apocryphal tale of another journalist who did so in years past.