There are thousands here, and more dark suits than a Moonie wedding. Few bothered to sit in the main hall to hear a succession of unscintillating ministers – but you should have seen the queue for a fringe meeting of Brexiteers.
It snaked through the conference building with activists eager to hear hardcore outery from proper Leavers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dan Hannan.
A leadership and Cabinet adrift from its membership. They should have held that fringe meeting in the big symphony hall and consigned party chairman Brandon Lewis and his ministerial droners to one of the B venues.
As one of those frustrated queuers, I can only bring you what I heard in the main hall. Theresa May entered just after 2pm and received a feathering of applause. This support was echoed when speakers said how badly she had been treated in Salzburg. She is liked moderately well here. Rapture is absent.
Pro-Brexit Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg delivers a speech at a Brexit rally during the Conservative Party Conference
If at Labour in Liverpool last week we had debt-addicted loonies, Birmingham yesterday was Constipation Centre. A succession of platform politicians strained, stared into the distance, and failed.
The ministers were shown up by visiting speakers. Businessman Digby Jones, non-partisan, sauntered on stage and grabbed everyone’s attention precisely because he did not spout time-blunted party-politico cliches. Hair swept back like some fattipuff grandee from Restoration theatre, Brummie Digby yacked away without autocue, leaning on the lectern as if about to order a pint of malmsey.
He slagged off both the Euro-crazed Financial Times (‘that propaganda sheet for Brussels’ – big applause) and Brexiteer Boris (‘irrelevant and offensive’ – also clapped, though less keenly). He gave a crisp explanation of why capitalism is essential for nurses and doctors and fire brigades, because it pays taxes. If the Tories didn’t stop squabbling, Corbyn would turn us into Venezuela.
Tieless Dominic McVey, barely 30, an entrepreneur with 20,000 employees, gave a frontline, business-savvy talk about his boxer-shorts factories in the Third World, as we are no longer meant to call it. Mr McVey did not use the lifeless cadences of the Whitehall stuffshirts. As a result he was rather persuasive about the real-politik usefulness of foreign aid.
There was a video by film-maker Richard Curtis and one by a teenage West Midlands councillor, an amiably lopsided lad, engagingly normal. Why can’t Tory grandees be like him instead of vote-losing Smurfs like James Brokenshire and Chris Grayling?
The day had begun with Mrs May on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. She came a cropper on the Windrush scandal. ‘I have apologised,’ she parroted. Where was the immediacy? She locks up like an inertia seatbelt. Boris may be unsafe in taxis but at least he is a warm- blooded life form.
Party chairman Lewis had been to arm-waving school. A trainee weather forecaster. He did some self-thrashing stuff about how the Tories didn’t have enough black activists. Perhaps that’s because you bore the pants off them, Brandon.
Agonisingly slow intros were done by a National Convention suit called Pearson. What a tortoise he was.
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson gave a speech that was genuinely transfixing, so weirdly was it delivered. He tried to make himself sound all gruff – listen, I’ve hit puberty! Lots of ‘I’m being sombre’ frowns, too. Eyebrows flat and low. Perhaps he just had raging indigestion.
Britain’s Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson gives a speech in the main hall on the first day of the Conservative Party Conference
Outside the conference area, some fool kept shouting ‘stop Brexit’. Maybe it was Dominic Grieve.
Inside, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt worked in some good digs at the EU – ‘we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape’ – but his oratory owes much to the carpentry shop. Is that a broom handle down the back of his smalls? Naughtily he mentioned the C-word (C for Chamberlain). He insisted that ‘no Conservative in this hall would ever repeat that mistake’ of appeasing Europe.
Mrs May was not in the hall at the time.