I am bringing you the latest news from the Labour party conference, live from my laptop. OK, I may not actually be in Liverpool, but then the conference is not actually “in” Liverpool; party conferences descend on to cities outside London in a cloud of scurrying people with wheelie bags and urgent texts, who live on a diet of free sandwiches then moan about how there is no decent food outside the capital. (This is why Blackpool is a no-no. They, apparently, cannot live on chips alone.).
This is the first year I haven’t been to a Labour conference for yonks. I went to Margate instead and had – God forbid – fun. The last couple of Labour conferences have not been fun. Being a super-empath I picked up so much tension – possibly because a couple of MPs actually burst into tears when they saw me – that I had a terrible nosebleed. The “first responders” were there quickly, assuming I had been in a fight, and I spent the rest of the day uneasily trying to ascertain the views of delegates in a shirt covered in blood.
I wandered between the main conference – Labour’s official one, which is conducted in a code of composites and motions, and the “World Transformed” one, which was whizzy, Momentumed up, young, and full of ideas. Some of the ideas are very old indeed, but it’s still a good thing.
All conferences are really about the fringe events. You go to the Conservative party conference with a degree of anthropological interest and find yourself suckered into lunatic, libertarian fringe parties – well I do anyway. My favourite was when I was greeted at the door and given a whole bottle of vodka. “That will be banned under Labour,” I was told. When I asked for something to mix it with they sneered, “You are such a girl.” Mostly, though, I go to sniff around these people, see them in the flesh, forgetting you can do it at Westminster any day of the week.
Now, though, it’s all designed for telly. Often I used to watch a speech, think it was not up to much and then go and watch the post-match analysis in my hotel room, by which time it would have turned into the greatest speech ever. When I went to Glastonbury, where I suffered dreadfully in a luxury yurt, I realised it was very much like a party conference. You can’t actually see any of the bands: it’s all designed for TV.
On TV you will see Theresa May’s hands shaking, Jeremy Corbyn’s unease with an autocue, Vince Cable brilliantly “spresming”. I mean, none of these people are orators, yet they will all get standing ovations. Delusional. What you really want are the bonkers fringe events where John Redwood malfunctions or two old Labour dinosaurs nearly come to blows.
The reality is that most of what is decided could be decided elsewhere. Half the MPs will blow in for a few hours. In this hermetically sealed environment, Tony Blair had a bridge built between his hotel and the conference centre in Brighton so he didn’t have to walk on the pavement. Nothing really changes.
In between, you can go to late-night discos where you have to dance on a carpet. Some people have unsuitable sex. I only know this because a fire alarm went off in the Manchester Hilton one year and we all had to leave our rooms … I was wrapped up in a foil blanket over my nightie outside, then surprisingly featured on Sky News as a homeless person.
This, I feel, says a lot about the quality of journalism this all produces. If you want to know what’s happening in this country you need to talk to those who don’t know that it’s conference season. Which is, actually, most people.
Angela Rayner has proved that accents matter more than ever
Angela Rayner, the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, is repeatedly called “thick” because of her accent. She told the editor of this newspaper that she is not seen as leadership material because of the way she speaks. She is proud of her background and proud of the way she has worked her way up, and so she should be. Accents matter more than ever, certain ones are acceptable to the middle classes – a soft Geordie one, for instance, certain Scots lilts – but actual working-class accents, no. They are OK for soaps in which men sleep with their brothers’ wives on crack, or Radio 4 plays about child abuse. Otherwise, no.
Most people in positions of power tone down a regional accent or do a mimicry of blanded-out RP. Both Blair and Corbyn try to sound more common than they are. What a game this all is. Who remembers when Thatcher got the elocution lessons where she went from screechy lower middle class to throatier sub-royal?
I am as prejudiced as anyone else, I stiffen when I hear not just a posh accent, but that upper-middle-class striving for languor effort of Jacob Rees-Mogg. It is pitiful for me to hear, just as my accent is not good enough for Radio 4 (polytechnic, according to a producer I overheard discussing me through the headphones).
In my lifetime, a London accent is ever-changing and I love the way that words come and go, but I still notice colleagues aiming for a more acceptable, respectable tone. Why? Because life is easier with it.
I was brought up in Suffolk by a grandmother from Norfolk. “Don’t you give me that old Suffolk sing-song,” she used to chide me. “We are better than that.” But I knew, even then, we weren’t.
I have 700 TV channels but nothing I want to watch
The cable guy came recently. Not THAT cable guy, although I love that film, and I went overnight from four channels to hundreds. Since I had a row with Virgin Media years ago, I just haven’t bothered. I am not a snob about telly. I used to watch a lot of it, and now I don’t. Event TV, crime, thrillers and most dramas are lost on me. And now suddenly I have 700 channels. It has given me the illusion of choice but often still there is nothing on that I want to watch. Ageing, I often feel, is simply a process of editing, and less is more. I was fine as I was .
