I’ve been watching, not religiously but on and off, the coverage of many a Conservative Party Conference going back to the late 70’s and early 80’s. Sometimes the conferences and what was said clashed with my own personal views that I held at the time but on other later occasions I found more that I agreed with. However there was one thing that was constant in what I saw of Tory Party conferences and that was that there was often a visible and palpable sense that this was a party where the members mattered and as conference was for them as well as for the mass media the Tories presented at their conferences policies that the members could support but also an image of get up and go.

Sadly this year’s Tory conference shows a party whose ‘get up and go’ has got up and gone on a very long holiday. What I saw was not a party that had gained a stonking majority in 2019 and was looking to go into the next election with some degree of confidence. What I saw was a party on its arse, a party which the members seem to have given up on and where the only enthusiasm has been found in the side rooms where those who are not in the favour of the leadership were speaking. It was a former, very short term, PM that created a buzz not the man who is not just the leader of the governing party but the UK PM.

Some of the announcements made at conference and just prior to conference such as promises, which the Tories will probably break if re-elected, to curb the excesses of the mentalist environmentalists who have guided party policy, are welcome. However the party has no sunk to such a level of distrust that it’s question as to how many voters who want conservative policies will trust the Tory party to deliver them. There was a shocking degree of unself-awareness in some of the keynote announcements of conference. The much vaunted and sorely needed roll back of the transgender capture of the adminisphere is to be praised, however it should be remembered that it was under a Conservative Party government that the cult of trans was allowed free will to gain influence over everything from the Civil Service to the National Health Service and to schools. In effect the Tories are asking us to trust them to put right problems that their own administration has caused. It was the Tories who ignored and in some cases actively encouraged the aims of the cult of trans and it is chutzpah beyond belief that we should now trust this party to do the right thing on this issue. In any event, if this proposal was implemented there is the problem that there are too many Tory MP’s who would block it. This is because there many in the Parliamentary Tory party who seem to be the sort who would be more than happy to sit with the reality challenged, Janus-faced, slippery, nutbags of the Liberal Democrat Party, rather than a party of genuine conservatives.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a time, not even when the Tories were in the governmental wilderness of the Blair and Brown years, that I saw the party so lacklustre. It looks like a party, as the Monty Python sketch once declared, that is ‘pining for the fiords’. Looking at what the Tory Party has become I can’t help but feel sad. They came in with a stonking majority and with great public goodwill because of their Brexit position and the freedom based noises that they made as part of their election campaign. Sadly they squandered that and are going out not with a bang but with a whimper of headline grabbing authoritarianism and promises that many of us don’t trust them to keep.