Diary – 30 September 2005

It was that faintly implausible radical and revolutionary, Clem Attlee, who once likened the Labour party annual conference to ‘a Parliament of the movement’. And so, indeed, it used to be before our current Great Helmsman and his chums on the central committee put an end to all that. The party may still make its autumnal trip to the seaside but all it does when it gets there is to lay on a pageant or present a TV carnival. Worse than that, it is now essentially a commercial undertaking, with even journalists — below the rank of editor or political editor — required to pay for the privilege of being allowed into the hall to listen to the leader’s speech. When I went to my first Labour party conference 50 years ago, there were no extensive arcades in which big business set out its wares, no fat cats jostling to get into the posher receptions and few, if any, ‘distinguished visitors’ (whom we probably would not have recognised even if they had turned up). Instead, there was a week of red-in-tooth-and-claw debate, with only the Reynolds News concert on the Sunday afternoon providing a preliminary lull but still notably failing to soothe the savage breasts of the assembled comrades. The truth was that, despite the mollifying efforts of the Co-op orchestra, most of them could hardly wait to get down to hand-to-hand combat. Eheu fugaces or, as Harry Davidson used to say on the BBC Home Service, those were the days.

In my more nostalgic moments I occasionally find myself wondering which have constituted the real defining conference events in all the years I’ve been attending. I missed Hugh Gaitskell’s brave ‘fight, fight and fight again’ speech at Scarborough in 1960, but I was there in Bournemouth in 1985 when Neil Kinnock rounded on Militant and virtually destroyed it in its Liverpool base with that one contemptuous phrase about ‘the grotesque chaos of a Labour council — a Labour council — hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’. (David Owen told me long afterwards that, when he watched Kinnock say that on television, he immediately knew that the SDP was finished.) But I still think I would award the palm to the roar that went up in the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool when Nye Bevan’s victory over George Brown for the party treasurership was announced in 1956. One thing New Labour has never seemed able to grasp is what a safety valve the old-style conference represented for the party’s foot soldiers. All right, who got elected treasurer didn’t really matter — any more than who came top of the constituency section of the national executive — but the sense that they were winning and carrying off such trophies did wonders for the morale (and, therefore, the numerical strength) of the rank and file.

Nowadays, of course, NEC elections hardly matter. That’s the way the new gang wanted it, especially after Ken Livingstone’s act of lese-majesty in keeping Peter Mandelson off that once symbolic body in 1997. The state of its current insignificance is shown by the manner in which Mark Seddon this week gave up his National Executive seat, which he’s held for some six years, to go off and work for al-Jazeera in New York. A distinguished editor of Tribune for more than a decade, at a mere 44 Seddon might well have seemed a natural recruit to Labour’s parliamentary party. But under the present democratic centralist administration that was never going to happen — and by taking himself off to America this talented protégé of Michael Foot has, with typical modesty, merely recognised reality.

One person, quite properly, not to be seen at Brighton was Sir Ian Blair. But the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police certainly seems to be putting himself about a bit. Not content with appearing last week both on Hardtalk and Any Questions?, he is due, I hear, to materialise in just over a month’s time as this year’s BBC Dimbleby lecturer. (I wonder if anyone has warned him about the terrible trouble his predecessor, Sir Robert Mark, got into with the lawyers when he delivered the Dimbleby lecture back in 1973.) Articulate though he is, I can’t help feeling that the publicity-driven course followed by our new Blairite top policeman is likely to prove a touch risky. But, given that his immediate predecessor has so effortlessly slotted into being a regular columnist for the News of the World, I can’t deny that it is a logical development.

Mention of Sir John Stevens inevitably brings to mind the name of David Blunkett. Can it really be only a week or two since we were being solemnly assured that it was only a matter of months before he would return in triumph to the Home Office? I can’t see that any longer as a practicable proposition: in fact, given his now amply documented record of telling porkie-pies, I find it hard to understand how he can even continue at the more lowly Department for Work and Pensions. From the moment in 1995 that he gave that solemn undertaking ‘Read my lips’ and appeared to pledge that there would be no selection for schools by examination or interview, and then promptly went back on it, there has had to be a question-mark over Blunkett’s allegiance to the truth. To those who share the general, cynical view of politicians as a race, that may seem harmless enough, but what kind of example can the most self-righteous prime minister since Gladstone possibly believe his colleague is setting for the ‘respect’ society he claims to be so desperately eager to create?

Even after his perennial platform success on Tuesday, I still have one doubt to register about Tony Blair, or rather his future. As with Nebuchadnezzar, the predominant loyalist refrain still appears to be ‘O, King, live for ever’, but since by his own choice that isn’t a genuine option, different considerations are bound to apply (not least to Blair himself). As the most thespian of politicians, his attention and anxiety will be dominated by the quality and popular appeal of his own performance, and he must be aware that the longer he goes on, the greater the danger of his boring the audience must become. The only way he can bring off a coup de thé