Conservative Party Conference 2010

Posted By: Wera Hobhouse
Date Posted: 05/10/2010

Observers of the Conservative Party Conference comment that so far it seems strangely subdued. I am not at the conference so I am not a good judge.

When I am at a Lib Dem conference I often find that what happens there and what is reported in the media doesn’t sound as if it is the same event. This is because the media often seems to have written the script even before the conference has happened. That the media hasn’t really got their own agenda for this year’s Conservative Party Conference is in itself a novelty.

The biggest novelty is of course the coalition government. While only a few months ago the assembled media and Conservative hard liners were telling us that coalition government would mean the end of proper government as we knew it, this has obviously not happened. In fact it seems to work remarkably well and the ‘strangest’ thing seems to be that most ordinary people like it. This is certainly what we hear from the door steps in our own wards. And come to think of it shouldn’t be such a strange thing because after all the British public didn’t vote for one party to govern.

So most of the media was wrong and a good chunk of the Conservative Party were wrong. What I think is remarkable is the way the Conservative Party leadership has embraced the new coalition politics. I am now listening properly when a Conservative politician speaks on telly or the radio. That is a novelty too. I don’t always agree, but I listen a lot more to the detail of the argument than I have for years. Coalition politics is about winning the argument within government, not just easing through your party’s standpoint with a majority in the House of Commons.

I understand that the Conservative Party Conference is not a huge party of celebration. Nor was the Lib Dem conference. But at the end of our conference we came away reassured that we were doing the right thing. I hope Conservative Party members and supporters will come to the same conclusion.