Conference call

Just back from the 2022 Conservative conference.

The first Tory conference I went to was in Brighton in 1984, the year the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel, killing five people and injuring 31.

As I’ve mentioned before I was in the hotel just two hours before the bomb went off in the early hours of the morning.

The next day I was in the conference hall when Mrs Thatcher arrived to give her scheduled speech. What an ovation she got.

In those days there was virtually no security. You could walk in and out of the conference centre and the main conference hotels (the Grand and the Metropole in Brighton) without being checked, but it all changed after that.

For almost three decades now we’ve had secure zones, airport style security and armed policemen.

But over the last 15 years an even bigger change has happened. The so-called fringe - hundreds of events organised by special interest groups including Forest - has moved centre stage.

Back in 2005, when we hosted our first party conference event (starring David Hockney) at the Labour conference in Brighton, fringe events weren’t allowed to compete with the official programme in the main hall.

The official programme usually began at ten and continued until five with a break for lunch so fringe meetings could only take place outside those times or during the lunch break.

In Birmingham this week the official programme in the main auditorium has been restricted to just a few hours in the afternoon and from what I’ve seen the hall has been pretty empty.

Fringe events meanwhile start at 7.30 and continue all day and well into the evening and the competition to attract an audience is immense.

Once inside the secure zone delegates are reluctant to leave it during the day because it means queuing to re-enter followed by a further security search but hosting a fringe meeting inside the secure zone costs thousands of pounds.

The last time the Conservatives were in Birmingham, in 2018, we hosted a couple of back-to-back meetings at Austin Court, a small conference centre a short walk from the International Conference Centre.

(Austin Court was also the venue for the inaugural Freedom Zone that Forest launched in partnership with The Freedom Association in 2008, but that’s another story.)

Four years ago Austin Court was a lot cheaper than being inside the secure zone (and I'm sure it still is) but the number of people who came was quite small - not disastrously so but small nonetheless.

This time therefore we bit the bullet and paid for a session in the Think Tent marquee.

Located just inside the secure zone (in Birmingham delegates have no choice but to walk past it), the Think Tent is a joint initiative launched a few years ago by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the TaxPayers Alliance.

It was worth every penny. Superbly organised by Sara Rainwater of the TPA (others may have been involved but Sara was our principal contact), many of the logistics were taken out of our hands which made it a relatively painless experience.

There was a bit of late drama when one of our panellists, Conservative peer Lord Moylan, dropped out on Friday, but within hours we managed to get an excellent replacement - Mark Oates, director of We Vape.

Mark was on honeymoon in a mountain villa in Santorini when we contacted him but 72 hours later he landed in Birmingham. Now that’s what I call dedication.

I chaired the event and the other panellists were our old friends Claire Fox (aka Baroness Fox of Buckley, above) and Chris Snowdon (IEA).

Prior to the event I was a bit concerned about how many people might come but I needn’t have worried. The location undoubtedly helped but I’m fairly sure our panel was a draw too.

Anyway the marquee was pretty full, which was good news.

I was very happy too with the panel which was arguably our most entertaining since Brighton in 2005 when our speakers included David Hockney, Joe Jackson and Daily Mirror columnist Sue Carroll (who sadly died in 2011).

Also on that panel was Claire Fox who is possibly even more outspoken now than she was then.

“I’m on the left and I’m far more pro-freedom than anyone I’ve met in the Conservative party,” she told our Tory audience on Monday. “What has happened to you lot? You’ve lost your bottle, in my opinion.”

I’ll post a few more soundbites plus a video of the event later today.

Final point. We tried very hard to get an anti-smoker on the panel – if not a prohibitionist then someone who at least supports the Government’s smoke free ambition.

No joy. Including MPs, they either declined our invitation or ignored it.

As a general rule I like to have a balanced debate with speakers representing both sides of the argument.

After Monday’s event I’ve changed my mind. Why give these fuckers the time of day? They won’t share a platform with us so why bother inviting them?

Either way it’s a lot more fun without them.

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

You are right to no longer invite anti smoker representatives. They just turn their nose up and ignore you. Why would they risk losing a debate with their enemy? They always feel much safer sniping from the sidelines and whispering poison in ministers's ears without challenge from their opponents.

If they ever had to debate or defend their stupid ideas in an open public forum where all sides can be heard, they would lose and they know it. That is exactly why they don't debate with Forest. They say it's about not engaging with "Big Tobacco" but they know Forest is a consumer group and one thing we consumers have learned time and again is how dishonest and deceitful the anti smoker lobbyists are.

Claire Fox was great but I do wish she wouldn't demean herself for being a smoker. Incidentally, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her lovely down to earth voice. I would also like to know how she knows how much tar is in her her Silk Cut these days since the removal of product information on tar and nicotine content with uglified (aka"plain" packaging) was forced upon us ensuring that we now have no idea what's in our cigarettes and tobacco.

Chris Snowden was great and it is nice to hear someone come out and say the truth that evidence shows most smokers do not want to quit. I found Mark Oates quite patronising as he pushed the idea that smokers are not vaping because we believe that vaping is harmful or more harmful than smoking and if only we could see the light.

It would be great if vaping advocates recognised that if smokers don't vape it is not because of scaremongering - we've lived with it for decades - but because we find vaping inferior and frankly a waste of time and money. Why not promote each to their own?

Enjoy vaping, enjoy smoking, but let's not try and convert each other. Let's stand up for each other against our joint enemy - public health zealots who Chris Snowden rightly said can achieve nothing by joining special interest temperance groups but give themselves credibility by joining public health and shoehorning themselves into positions of power and influence in Government institutions.