How I survived the Tory Conference.

For the last decade or so, Tory party Conferences have been been like gatherings of an obscure cult - devotees of a faith that time had passed by. New Messiahs came and went: William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard. False Gods appeared like Michael Portillo, urging a clean break with Old Testament Thacherism. But no one really cared about the Tories' petty passions, their esoteric doctrines, and congregations dwindled. Until now. Suddenly, the Tories are back.

The atmosphere in Manchester last week couldn't have been more different from that of the humbled, apologetic almost abject party of the last twelve years. Peckers are up, eyes bright and tails are bushier than ever. Conference looks younger - all the wannabe politicians, with their spiky haircuts and TK Maxx suits, who used to hang around the Labour Conference now seem to have decamped to the Tories. 

The women are more attractive. I know it sounds facile and sexist to judge a party on the appearance of its female camp followers, but believe me it is the first thing you notice. For years, younger, fashion-conscious women wouldn't have been been dead at a Tory conference. It was strictly for the over sixties - the average age, indeed, of a Conservative Party member in the late nineties. Now the Tories are socially acceptable again, even eligible. 

Going to and from various events I kept bumping into Zac Goldsmith, the glamorous and rich Tory environment guru, who seemed to have been posted outside every venue, surrounded by elegant women and young men with those suit jackets that are too small for them. Hah - I thought - bet he's been placed there by the PR people as a permanent photo op. Until I asked him and it emerged that, as a heavy smoker, he has to spend a lot of his time out doors. 

Of course, many of the sharp and smart young men and women I saw around aren't actually Tories, but representatives of the many firms, lobby groups, NGOs and trade associations here to lobby the people everyone expects to form the next government. But that only confirms the sense of a party back on a winning streak.

I recalled the days I used to attend Tory Conferences under Margaret Thatcher. Then the Tories exuded power like a pungent pheromone. They knew who they were: the most electorally successful party in Europe. The party of government; inheritors of The Great Tradition: Pitt, Disaeli, Churchill, Thatcher. Tories were bred for government and expected it as their birthright. 

A little of that arrogance is back, but not much. Every Tory I spoke to insisted that there was still ' a mountain to climb...couldn't take voters for granted' etc.. The Tories seem a bit like a young offender who isn't entirely confident that they've gone straight, or an alcoholic only recently on the wagon. Rather like the underclass victims of 'the broken society' who featured in the endless Tory videos. Conference these days is less like a series of debates than a film festival intererspersed with chat shows and the odd speech. They even had to put up with a video of Bono.

In the new user friendly Tory party every platform has to have a serial offender (reformed) a member of an ethic minority and a presentable woman. The Tories were trying so hard it hurt. So it was a shock when one of the youngest Tory stars - the shadow education secretary Michael Gove - a man who used to have sideburns and appeared with the luvvies on Newsnight Review - gave the only truly traditional Tory speech of the week. Failing schools? Discipline, school uniforms, harder exams, more discipline. Staff Sergeant Gove even promised a "Troops to Teachers" programme in which soldiers will be fast tracked to the classroom to inject a bit of army discipline instead of that self expression nonsense. Pure Monty Python, but the Tries loved it.

Back in the law and order chat show we had obligatory mix of dark skins, high heels and hard luck stories. In place of capital punishment and prison works,  we were offered understanding, summary justice, and, yes, more discipline. To tackle the drunken society the Tories promise to increase drink prices on things like high strength cider - though Buckfast wasn't mentioned. The SNP claimed a Tory own goal since the Scottish Tories have opposed minimum pricing in Scotland

The Scottish Tories are undoubtedly the weakest link in the new Tory chain. There was precious little glamour at their fringe event. The shadow Scottish secretary, David Mandell, or " Man dull " as he is known by his detractors, was on exceptional form -  literally boring for Britain. They desperately need something to talk about in this election other than the the West Lothian Question, the Union and Alex Salmond's perfidy.  Then the Scottish parliamentary leader, Annabel Goldie, took the stand, dressed in a lumberjack shirt and trousers. Had she decided to express sartorial solidarity with the proletariat? Had she just come from the first ever gay pride reception at a Tory Conference? No - she had been roped into one of the 'community initiatives' that are obligatory for the modern Tories to show they are street smart and down with the people. 

Annabel is a great character, but she doesn't make up for the lack of a proper party in Scotland. They have only one MP and little chance of winning more than three or four in May. It is a shocking reflection on their political failure that while Cameron is streets ahead of Labour in England, in Scotland the Tories are a very poor third, and less popular than under Margaret Thatcher. They can't go on blaming her legacy and the poll tax. That was all 20 years ago.

The Scottish Conservatives have not reformed. They are time warp Tories,  They could worse than take up the calls I heard repeatedly in Manchester - though not from Scottish spokespeople - for Cameron to call an independence referendum. What better way to margialise the SNP and defend the Union by revealing majority support for it in Scotland. It would give Cameron a stake in Scottish politics and make up for the lack of MPs But it's just not going to happen. 

The failure of the Scottish Tories is all the stranger when you realise that many of the brightest Tories in the UK party are Scots. At one of the best fringe events I attended, at the think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, Fraser Nelson, Scottish editor of the Spectator and the former Scotsman editor, Iain Martin did a very good job of popularising the arguments of another Scot Professor Niall Ferguson about the economic crisis. In an important new CPS pamphlet Ferguson warns of the danger of leaving the banking cartels intact. . We are not living in a market economy any more, the Harvard Professor argues, but under a form of "state monopoly capitalism" . A handful of banks that are too big to fail have managed to capture the state. Ferguson argues passionately that if capitalism is to survive then these big banks must be broken up. 

This was fascinating. And a million miles from the politically correct chat shows on the conference floor. If only the Scottish Tories had an ounce of this intellectual firepower. If only they could find some way of modernising and tapping into the new energy that Cameron has unleashed. Tories are still a race apart and still the party of wealth, but following my bold probe into the outer reaches of the conference, I can report that there is intelligent life in the Tory Party. Just not as we know it.

Why do the Tories hate Europe so much?

How ironic it would be if the Tories were to fall apart again over Europe, just as David Cameron is entering the home straight for Number Ten.  Almost as ironic as Tony Blair becoming president of the EU, just as Gordon Brown loses the next general election.  Some people are just born lucky. But is David Cameron one of them?

   Surely you say, the Tories couldn’t be so stupid to have a row about Lisbon. Surely they realise that this is no time for division; no time for a lapse into xenophobia, just when he voters were thinking the Conservatives had put all that anti-foreigner stuff behind them. Well, no one ever lost money by overestimating the stupidity of political parties.  A majority of Tory supporters, according to the website Conservativehome, would be happy to leave the EU altogether.  It’s not just the Lisbon Treaty, with its qualified majority voting and common foreign policy, they want to dump.  

   But their bottom line is a referendum on Lisbon and the are pressing David Cameron to give them what they want, even if - as everyone expects after the decisive Irish vote - the treaty is ratified by the two remaining doubters, Poland and the Czech Republic. Tory eurosceptics have already forced Cameron to join forces in the European parliament with right wing loonies like the Latvian For Freedom and Fatherland, which honours the Waffen SS. Europe has already eclipsed most of Cameron’s pre-conference policy proposals on elderly care, welfare reform and public spending. 

   What is it about Europe that really gets the Tory goat?  The European Union is not a federal superstate, but a fairly loose confederation of sovereign nations who unite to meet specific economic objectives.  It is exactly what David Cameron said he wanted the EU to be in his Andrew Marr interview yesterday:”an association of states not a country”.  But suspicion of Europe, and of Germany in particular, is deeply rooted in the Tory psyche. We learned recently that, in 1989, Margaret Thatcher was so worried about the possibility of a united Germany dominating Europe that she asked the soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to stop civil rights demonstrators tearing down the Berlin Wall

    This kind of paranoia clearly dies hard. We are dealing with something that isn’t entirely rational - it is about a pervasive sense of national insecurity in middle England - you just don’t get it up here -; a fear that somehow Britain will wake up one day and find that it is no longer run from Westminster but from Brussels. Many eurosceptics think we already are.   Perhaps it is something to do with the legacy of British imperialism - an inability to accept the reality that Britain is now just another country in Europe and not a regional superpower.   

   But there is a new generation of voters today who are used to travelling around Europe, don’t believe that it is a threat to Britain, and really don’t like having to change their money at the border.  Don’t the Tories listen to their pals in industry and commerce who are fed up with currency fluctuations that make a lottery of their investment decisions?  Not even the Icelanders are anti-European nowadays.  Only Britain remains fearful of contamination from the ‘continent’. 

   The EU has been astonishingly successful, not just in promoting prosperity  but in promoting peaceful coexistence between nations. Tories scorn this idea, claiming that peace in Europe has nothing to do with Brussels and a lot to do with globalisation.  True, the internationalisation of economic life has made the idea of war between France and Germany seem ridiculous. But look at Central and Eastern Europe and it isn’t, and the prospect of joining the EU has been a powerful and genuine force for peace.  It is not inconceivable that there could have been war or communal unrest in the Baltic states, for example, had they not been so desperate to join the EU.  The Balkans too are learning to live together since they too want to be part of the European club, and that means no ethnic cleansing,  no funny business about borders and no goose-stepping military parades.  

  The EU has created an entirely new kind of international political entity: a country without a state.  Speaking personally, I could do with a little more state - a more democratic one. The European parliament has very limited power. Under Lisbon, the first ever president will be chosen by the heads of the member states rather than by the people - which helps explain why Tony Blair is likely to win when he wouldn’t have had a cat in hell’s chance of winning an election because of Iraq.   

   The euro, introduced simultaneously in 16 states in January 2002 amid scorn from eurosceptics in Britain. It is now the second largest reserve currently in the world used daily by 327 million Europeans. We’ve just been through the worst financial crisis in sixty years, and the euro has thrived.  The main reason why Ireland voted so decisively for the Lisbon Treaty was because the credit crunch has reminded them just reliant they are now on the European Central Bank . 

  

  Precisely! say the eurosceptics - the German bundesbankers have little Ireland under their heel, just as they always planned.  Britain never, never, never will be a slave to the ECB.   Really, there is no arguing with Conservative anti-Europeans, which is why David Cameron gave into them in 2005 and promised them a referendum on Lisbon.  Without that pledge he would not be leader today, and they are now calling it in. On TV yesterday, Cameron sounded deeply unconvincing when he said that he didn’t want to talk about holding a referendum if Lisbon is ratified - which after Ireland it almost certainly will be - because it might “undermine or prejudice” the debates taking place in member states.  But that’s precisely what the eurosceptics want him to do: provide a beacon to those few remaining free peoples of Europe.  Take on the Brussels beast single-handed if necessary.  

    But the voters of Britain are watching very carefully.  If the Manchester conference turns into a rabble of foam flecked anti-Europeans, dictating terms to Cameron, then the people might decide that, after all, the Tories aren’t quite ready for power. The next forty eight hours will be crucial.