Conference season and the UK's divided parties

The good news is, in any normal circumstance, it shouldn’t really be possible for things to get any worse for Theresa May. The bad news is that they always seems to.

Last year certainly seemed to represent a low mark in the niche world of party conference speech appreciation. In fact, the speech was so bad it actually redefined the concept of a public-speaking nightmare.

Granted, things hadn’t been going brilliantly for the Prime Minister up till then. The UK Conservative Party conference had come hot on the heels of a crushingly disappointing election result, with the PM throwing away her majority after launching an appalling campaign to win an election she never had to call. The party started the campaign 20 points ahead of Labour and ended it by losing 13 seats across the UK. One day, she had a working majority – inherited from David Cameron – and the next, she was handing over around £1bn to the DUP to buy its support and hold on to power.

The Tory campaign had been woeful. When she came to Scotland, May’s campaign event had been booked in secret, under the guise of a children’s party, deep in the Aberdeenshire woods, and it seemed to continue from there. Almost every event sent out the signal the PM was hiding from the public.

From then on, everything seemed to slump. ‘Strong and stable’ moved from being a campaign slogan into a form of parody, and criticism mounted.

And so by the time the conference came, four months later, May really needed a strong performance. In the event, she produced the most painful spectacle in conference history.

What started with a comedian bursting on stage and handing her a giant, blown up P45 with her name on it quickly got worse. The paper listed the reason for the apparent termination of employment as ‘neither strong nor stable’.

At first she tried to keep talking, as though the prankster might get bored and wander off. But he got closer and closer, eventually blocking the TV angle. Smiling awkwardly, she eventually accepted the piece of paper.

It was shortly after that she started coughing. Not once or twice, but relentlessly. Great, rasping coughs. Over and over and over. At one point, it looked unlikely she would be able to finish.

Still, she got through that too, aided by repeated standing ovations from delegates to buy her time for a drink of water. It was only because she managed to stumble on to the end that the audience were treated to the sight of her backdrop collapsing.

Strong and stable it was not. The slogan behind had promised the Tories were ‘building a country that works for everyone’, but the construction was shoddy.

The letter ‘F’ went first, though others followed. By the time she left stage, the board was covered in gibberish. For a PM who was trying to refute suggestions that her leadership was crumbling, it was far from ideal.

Yet one year on, with the anniversary of the speech upon us, May is still in power. The talk of coups and conspiracies has continued unabated, yet at the same time, Theresa May remains.

Boris Johnson, seen as her most likely challenger, is gone from cabinet, with the former foreign secretary claiming he could not agree to the PM’s Chequers deal, two days after he agreed to the PM’s Chequers deal. David Davis had gone a day or so before that, for the same reason.

Yet with Brexit looming – when the conference starts it will be just 180 days away – and given the position Labour finds itself in, there’s an argument she will be able to plough on with her plans for leaving the EU regardless.

Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech certainly attracted less publicity than May’s – surely a good thing – yet the past year has hardly been kind to the Labour leader either.

For Corbyn, the build-up to the 2017 election had been beset by attacks from within his own party, amid a widespread expectation that Labour was heading for collapse.

by Mandy Rhodes

All three main UK party leaders face questions not just of their own survival but also of their parties

But predictions were wrong yet again, with Labour increasing its seats total from 232 to 262. It wasn’t enough to win a majority, but, at the same time, it was enough to deprive Theresa May of hers.

The signs were there to see. A leaked manifesto pledging to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail, the energy companies and the water industry attracted support, while a surge in popularity among students and young people saw Labour’s poll ratings rise.

There was even a partial resuscitation of both Labour and the Conservatives in Scotland, with Labour climbing from one seat up to seven, and the Tories jumping from one up to 13 north of the border.

So it was a very strange election, all in all. Particularly in the sense that no one seemed sure of who had won.

And maybe that explains the year which followed, with the last 12 months seeing the two biggest parties in the UK consumed and distracted by plotting, alongside constant rumours that plans were afoot for a new ‘centrist’ party. Those rumours may frustrate the Lib Dems, with the party’s conference last week seeing speaker after speaker line up to stake a claim for the middle ground of British politics.

Not that anyone has spent much time talking about Corbyn’s policies – whether those announced from the conference stage or otherwise. His address had given a fair indication of what he had planned for his policy agenda, with announcements on rent controls and new measures to introduce “new participatory forms of management” in the workplace, alongside repeated attacks on the politics of austerity.

Yet, with the Labour conference upon us, Corbyn’s approach to tax and spend has arguably been the least of his troubles, with the UK party leader seemingly incapable of putting a halt to claims of widespread antisemitism in the party.

Allegations have continued for almost two years now, but things reached a head with a secret recording from the party’s NEC of Peter Willsman, one of Corbyn’s allies, accusing Jewish “Trump fanatics” of inventing claims of antisemitism in the party.

The meeting ended with the party refusing to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, including all its examples.

Things then deteriorated further when Labour launched disciplinary action against MP Margaret Hodge, after she accused Corbyn of being “an antisemite and a racist” over his handling of Labour’s dispute with Jewish community leaders.

The dispute seems to have taken a calmer turn, particularly after the party agreed to adopt all 11 examples accompanying the IHRA definition in its code of conduct, though it’s currently unclear how long the period of relative serenity will hold.

But while Corbyn battled perceptions of bigotry from party officials and grassroots activists, for May, the trouble has been closer to home. In fact, her problem has been a simple one. It’s been Boris Johnson.

Leadership challenges aside, Johnson was himself embroiled in accusations of racism after publishing a Telegraph piece in which he said Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes” before comparing them to “bank robbers”.

Anti-racism campaigners condemned the comments as a gift to the far right, while former Conservative chairwoman Baroness Warsi described the remarks as “offensive and deliberately provocative, but very clever politics”.

As she saw it – and she was not alone – the comments were less an attempt at stimulating a debate and more about “trying to get airtime and attention on an issue which he knows will resonate with a certain part of the Tory party”.

Accusations of bigotry continued to haunt the party north of the border, too. In May, a Conservative councillor was expelled from the party after it emerged he had formerly been an activist for the BNP. Yet, for the PM, concern over Islamophobia is unlikely to top her list of concerns as she starts to put her conference speech together.

Clearly questions over Brexit strategy still loom large over both parties. For the PM, the conference will represent a chance to pull support together behind her latest plan, with May’s team attempting to use the threat of the devastation brought by a no-deal Brexit as a stick to bring some discipline to her backbenchers.

Whether that will be possible or not is unclear, though there’s very little in May’s last two years in power which suggest she will have a sudden change of heart and reach out for compromise with critics – either internal or external.

As Johnson put it, using his column in the Telegraph, the proposals put forward by May were a “constitutional abomination” that would result in a “total write-off of Brexit”.

He said: “If Chequers were adopted it would mean that for the first time since 1066 our leaders were deliberately acquiescing in foreign rule.”

But the PM seemed undaunted. As she responded, in an interview with Panoroma, the party has a simple choice: her deal or nothing.

For Corbyn, the question is perhaps more complicated, with more than half of the 272 debate motions submitted for the conference relating to Brexit.

Labour policy is currently to oppose a second Brexit referendum, but with senior figures insisting that all options should be kept under consideration, and with around 151 Brexit-related motions being put forward, the party’s leadership will need to walk a careful line to avoid a conference meltdown.

Labour activist Michael Chessum, from the Another Europe is Possible campaign, urged Labour to make a second Brexit vote a manifesto commitment ahead of the next general election. He said of the current Labour plan to stay closely aligned to the EU: “Of all the options, soft Brexit is the least popular with the electorate.”

Meanwhile, Labour is currently reassessing a range of its internal democracy processes before conference gets to vote on a set of proposals. Mandatory reselection is not expected to feature in the plans. However, with a recent survey from grassroots pressure group Momentum revealing that three-quarters of delegates back changing internal rules to ensure sitting MPs undergo a contest to be reselected, it’s probably fair to say that anything could happen.

And so, with both of the UK’s biggest parties consumed by questions ranging from policy to internal politics, conference season will take place on top of a bed of kindling. Like May’s speech last year, it promises to be entertaining – one way or another.