When David Cameron finishes his oration to the Tory faithful in Manchester today, the political party conference season will be at an end.
There has been almost a month of sanctimonious waffle from the big names, spurious attacks on them by opponents and deeply dull speeches from delegates.
Conferences are welcomed by political zealots who fancy a few days away, journalists who have an easy fixed event to cover and by host cities which like the publicity.
But to the non-political majority, they are simply an excuse for vapid slogans, empty rhetoric and drinking sprees in the evening.
I covered conferences for a good many years and at first there was genuine political debate at the Labour meetings while the Liberals made decisions that became party policy.
The Tories, then more sophisticated than their rivals, stage managed their shindigs but even that could fall apart as on the famous occasion exactly 50 years ago when Harold Macmillan resigned, there was an unseemly battle to replace him as Prime Minister.
Gradually the other parties went the same way so that conferences are carefully controlled by managers and spin doctors.
Before security was tightened, it used to be possible for ordinary folk to see political leaders and sometimes even have a word with them as they walked from the conference centre to the seafront hotels.
Understandably, ever since the 1984 Grand Hotel bombing, conferences have been held in a fortress-like secure island and this year barriers were so tall in Brighton it was not even possible to see the Labour delegates going into the Brighton Centre.
There has been a huge decrease in party allegiances in Britain over recent years. Turnout in general elections is almost at a record low.
The Young Conservatives had more members in the 1950s than all three main parties in total have today.
Politicians like Sir Andrew Bowden, the former Brighton Kemptown MP, became national figures through the YCs.
I remember reporting on an YC meeting in Hove during the 1960s which 150 people attended, among them about five future MPs.
Interest in politics was such that The Argus would send a reporter to all 19 ward Tory associations in Brighton and they would come back with good stories.
The Young Socialists, much given to Marxism in many forms, were also numerous while the Young Liberals were so revolutionary that their policies were largely inchoate.
Parties would have paid agents in most constituencies such as the punctilious Nobby Clarke for Labour in Kemptown and the military Colonel Gerry Exley in Hove. Now most of those posts have been amalgamated or lost.
There used to be real and fundamental |differences between the two main parties but these have largely disappeared as |both moved on to the centre ground |already partly occupied by the Liberal Democrats.
Conferences were always held by the seaside, often in towns as small as Scarborough until they became so big that only Bournemouth, Blackpool or Brighton could host them.
So much store was set on having them that when the old, makeshift meeting hall disappeared, no time was lost in building the Brighton Centre – the first purpose-built convention centre in Britain.
Tourism chiefs always reckoned that the big party conferences were worth millions of pounds to the resort, even though the hall was let to them for free, and I saw an estimate that Labour this year had brought £15 million to Brighton.
Yet on the Saturday of the conference I spoke to a cabbie who had not yet had a single fare-paying delegate and that night in a city centre pub I saw no one who looked remotely political.
The number of delegates was given as 10,000 but I doubt if there were anything like that number as membership is declining and the hall holds 5,000 at maximum.
Publicity from the conference is said to be a hidden bonus for Brighton but the main memory for many TV watchers will have been a fight between a blogger and a protester during a filmed interview in which both rolled around the seafront in an unedifying but comical manner.
Now major cities are vying for conference business such as Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, making it harder for Brighton to compete.
Is it worth trying to bring these fading events to Brighton – especially as the Tories won’t normally come because of bad memories?
And will a party sooner or later say it’s not worth spending millions of pound on phoney conferences which only increase the contempt most people have for this country’s politics?
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel