Ego warriors
A few weeks ago someone suggested I might like to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) currently taking place in London.
CPAC is an American organisation whose conferences bring a touch of American razzle-dazzle to the political sphere. The GB version – led by Liz Truss – was supposed to bring the same energy to the UK but I wasn’t really attracted by the list of speakers.
Also, while I don’t think she should have been sent to jail for an ill-judged social media post that was quickly deleted, I have absolutely no interest in listening to the likes of Lucy Connolly, the ‘free speech campaigner’ (sic) whose presence suggests, to me at least, a lack of judgement on the part of the organisers.
Either way, I wasn’t prepared to spend £100 for general admission to the two-and-a-half day conference (although, to be fair, £100 isn’t bad value for a conference these days), let alone £600 to attend both the conference and tonight’s ‘Sir Winston Churchill Gala Dinner’.
The problem is, the so-called ‘conservative right’ is such a broad church it includes a lot of people I neither respect nor want to be seen with. It’s not a coalition that can be sustained because there are far too many ego warriors within its ranks, which is why I think Kemi Badenoch is right (no pun intended) to steer clear of events like this and focus on redefining what the Conservative Party – not the broader conservative right – stands for and represents.
Andrew Griffith, Conservative MP and Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade, was one of the speakers yesterday but I understand he was there in a personal capacity and was not representing the party or the shadow cabinet. The same, I assume, is true of former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.
As it happens, reports suggest that the first day of CPAC GB was a bit of a damp squib, with the 500-seats (in a large hall) less than half full for most of the day, and the exhibition area almost empty.
I believe that Nigel Farage is due to speak today and he will no doubt bring his own brand of crusading energy to the event, but I’m not convinced that a US-style convention is the way forward for genuine conservatives in Britain because it feels a bit, well, un-British.
Anyway, you can probably guess what the Guardian thought of it (Liz Truss wheels out a series of C-list ghouls for drab London CPAC event), but even Ollie Dean, assistant editor of ConservativeHome (and a guest at the recent Forest Lunch & Awards), sounded a bit dubious:
I felt as though I was in some pound shop MAGA rally – and the hats embroidered with “Make Britain Great Again” didn’t particularly help matters …
But perhaps the worst sin of all? There was no on-site bar. The hacks I spoke to were livid, to the extent that two of them, having been at the conference for just thirty minutes, gave up and went in search of the nearest pub.
See: CPAC Great Britain – an echo chamber of American populism.
CPAC Great Britain logo: Joseph Robertson/X
