The day Tory leadership candidate came second in Tories Got Talent!

Postscript to the Conservative Party conference.

In my opening remarks to a fringe meeting hosted by the TaxPayers Alliance, I mentioned the Freedom Zone, a two-day mini conference that ran in parallel to the main conference.

It was launched in Birmingham in 2008 by Forest and the Freedom Association and between us we hosted 18 events. The majority were panel meetings or one-on-one interviews, but I was keen to try something a little different so to finish the first day we put on what we described as a ‘political chat show’.

Presented by Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), the guests were Michael White, assistant editor of the Guardian; Mark Littlewood, director of Progressive Vision, a classical liberal think tank; freedom of information campaigner Heather Brooke; former MSP Brian Monteith (later to become an MEP); and Neil Rafferty, who was working for Forest but had recently founded The Daily Mash, a satirical website.

It went quite well but even better was the event that concluded the Freedom Zone on the second day. ‘Tories Got Talent’ was conceived as a political version of Britain's Got Talent and as I wrote at the time:

Contestants were invited to speak for up to three minutes on a topical political issue. Their contributions were then commented upon by a panel of judges - compere Iain Dale, Nadine Dorries MP and Jonathan Isaby, soon to be co-editor of Conservative Home but then working for the Daily Telegraph.

To be honest, some people (including Iain Dale!) had their doubts about this event. They thought it wouldn't work. I felt that if we got the right compere, the right judges, and enough contestants everything would be fine!! We did and it was. The only problem was that, unexpectedly, too many people (15) wanted to take part with the result that the event over-ran and we had to drop three speakers as the clock ticked on ... and on.

Tories Got Talent was exactly what I hoped it would be - good entertainment allied to some serious political messages. There were two deliberately funny speeches and one inadvertently funny speech as speakers tackled Europe, the Post Office, the smoking ban, and so on. Some were better than others (as you would expect) but the judges hit just the right note, offering constructive criticism without being too harsh.

The winner - chosen by the audience from a shortlist of five selected by the judges - was Rupert Matthew, a prospective European parliamentary candidate for the East Midlands, who gave a very funny speech entitled, ‘Don't mention Europe - I did, but I think I got away with it’.

Today Rupert is the Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland.

What I had forgotten, however, until I stumbled on this blog post by Iain Dale (now a successful broadcaster), was the identity of the contestant who came second.

Dear reader, it was none other than James Cleverley, one of the four remaining candidates to be the new leader of the Conservative Party and, by common consent, the candidate who got the warmest reception and appeared to benefit most as a result of the speeches they each gave on Wednesday.

In 2008 however he was ‘merely’ a member of the London Assembly, and it was almost six years before he became the member of parliament for Braintree in the May 2015 election.

I won’t comment on his chances of becoming the next Conservative leader (although they do seem to have improved), but it would amusing if the new party leader (and potential PM) was once the runner-up in an event I organised.

PS. It was great to see Simon Richards, a former director of The Freedom Association, in Birmingham last week.

Simon and I organised the first Freedom Zone together, and he subsequently kept it going for several years in Manchester and again in Birmingham.

He retired a few years ago so I don’t see him very much these days, but when I do it always brings back a lot of memories!