When I had to attend Tory Party conferences in my journalist days, I often disagreed with what was being said – but I could usually at least work out why they were saying it.
And while I may have raged at both the rhetoric and the policies, I could recognise in Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, Norman Tebbit and others real leadership and political nous.
This week, dipping in and out of the Manchester Tory gathering online and on TV, I have been at a complete loss to fathom what is going on.
There seems to be no method in the madness. As a former colleague in the Number 10 comms team texted me to say: ‘It takes a very special genius to scrap the country’s biggest infrastructure project in the Northern city that will be most hit by it.’
The ‘will he, won’t he?’ HS2 saga, when we all knew that he would, was just one of many weird things going on in Manchester.
Liz Truss showed that whatever else she has learned from the shortest premiership in history, it was not humility. Yet she vied with Priti Patel’s new dance partner Nigel Farage, who has damaged the Tory Party more than anyone but Tony Blair in recent times, as the most sought after selfie victim.
Weird. Just weird.
Most of the ministers’ speeches were delivered to audiences a fraction of the size of those I used to sit among, pen in hand.
The content was equally dire by comparison.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper took us into the world of conspiracy theory with his claims of ‘sinister’ plans to tell us where and when we could shop (presumably under a Labour government); his Cabinet colleague Claire Coutinho, bred on Boris Johnson’s normalising of lying, felt not merely able to prattle nonsense about a planned tax on meat (again, all allegedly part of Labour’s sinister secret thinking) but doubled down when challenged about it.
Coming hot on the heels of Rishi Sunak ‘saving us’ from seven-bin waste management, which precisely nobody was proposing, this was all evidence that the Tories are moving into full-on, Trumpian, post-truthery and alternative facts.
The Conference felt like a parallel universe to the Britain of crumbling schools, dire trains, striking doctors and nurses, millions on waiting lists, record use of foodbanks, sewage pouring into our rivers and seas.
And inside the Conference, another parallel universe; on the one hand ministers queued to tell us how brilliantly they were all doing, and what an amazing PM Sunak was – most of those sections of their speeches felt cut and pasted from the same praise they once gave to Johnson and Truss – and on the other they were telling us that they had to make big changes because we’d had 30 years of political failure.
Now I am sure we can all understand why Sunak wanted to say ‘30’ rather than merely the 13 years during which his Party has been in power. But it was a very strange message for a Party onto its fifth Prime Minister in a row.
‘Long term decisions for a brighter future …’ Not a bad slogan. Serious politics not headline-grabbing gimmicks. The right approach.
But, a bit like the ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’ he promised on taking office, his first conference as Tory leader was anything but serious.
I couldn’t see any coherent theme drawing together all the various new ideas and initiatives announced from the podium, many of which seemed forgotten by the next day.
Instead, I saw lots of bluster, and lots of Labour-bashing and I will say this for Sunak – he keeps smiling when his colleagues, and political realities, give him plenty of reasons not to.
But as his speech ended, I was left with three abiding impressions from it.
First, though his wife read her speech perfectly well, there was something odd about having a supremely wealthy person tell us that her husband was the right man to look after families who were struggling.
Second, that his jibe at Nicola Sturgeon ‘going down’ struck me not just as low, but a possible contempt of court.
Third, that the reason he felt able to make so many big promises was that he probably won’t be around long enough to be judged against them.
He was creating plenty of opportunities for Tory candidates going into an election promising lots of things for their area. The problem for Sunak is that they made plenty of the same promises last time, and the time before that.
Trust is hard to win, easy to lose, and this week it felt very much like the Tories had lost it.
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