What I learnt trying to buy lunch for an anti-Tory protestor

The mood at the Conservative party conference this week was a little subdued, and no wonder. As those who watched the television coverage will know, everyone entering the secure zone had to run a gauntlet of potty-mouthed protestors, their faces twisted into masks of hate. It’s not easy to celebrate after you’ve just been showered with spit and called a ‘Tory murderer’. Jeremy Corbyn made a point in his conference speech last week of asking his supporters to treat their opponents with respect and not descend to personal abuse, but I’m not sure how many of them got the message. If the atmosphere in Manchester was anything to go by, the ‘new politics’ is going be a lot like the politics of the 1970s and 1980s, with hard-left activists engaging in violent direct action. It feels like things are about to take a nasty turn.

On Tuesday, as I made my way through the streets of Manchester to the central convention complex, I came up with a brainwave. Instead of just walking through the police barriers as quickly as possible, eyes glued to the ground, I would stop and try and convince one of the protestors to have lunch with me. My plan was to persuade them that I wasn’t an evil scumbag, determined to privatise the NHS, demonise people on benefits and enrich the 1 per cent, but someone who shared many of the same values as them. I wanted to show them that it was possible to be a Tory and, at the same time, care about the poor and the dispossessed. If I could get this person to understand that we’re motivated by much the same things, but simply disagree about how best to achieve them, perhaps they’d stop referring to all Conservatives as ‘scum’. It would be a small victory in an otherwise unsettling few days.

Sure enough, I was met with a chorus of abuse as I approached the barrier, with some of them identifying me by name and saying it with a kind of despairing resignation, as if I really was beyond hope.