Volume II of Charles Moore’s outstanding biography of Margaret Thatcher has made less impact on the conference than Vol I (2013) did with its cache of revelatory family letters about early boyfriends and her war-dodging teens. Nor is it easy for a reputable author in 2015 to compete with Lord Ashcroft’s pig-poking claims. But the extracts in the Thatcher-worshipping Daily Telegraph played down Moore’s eyewitness description of the Iron Lady “screaming, foaming at the mouth” on Wobbly Wednesday, the crisis that nearly derailed her 1987 re-election campaign. The author is less mealy mouthed. In an interview with the ConHome website (prop. Lord Ashcroft), Moore says she went “bonkers”. Never quite recovered either.
• More thoughtful Tories on the conference fringe realise that Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader presents them with dangers as well as good jokes, chiefly the threat of a split over Europe. At one meeting on how to tackle Corbyn, a delegate from Devon suggested moving the conference venue away from demo-prone cities like Manchester to places “with no bloody public transport, so the rabble can’t get to it.” Bideford here we come.
• What’s the difference between common ground and centre ground, between David Cameron, who uses the former, and his buddy George Osborne? The chancellor used the latter again in his conference speech on Monday, which was weightier and more soporific than his pyrotechnic leadership rival Mayor Boris will improvise on Tuesday. Experts suggest common ground is wider, more inclusive, even harking back to our shared medieval experience. Centre ground is more technocratic, explicitly political. Osborne reads books (Boris only writes them) and knows that the centre ground shifts rightwards under a Labour government and vice versa. Hence his One Nation workers’ party claims on Monday. Old Tory leftie Michael Heseltine spotted the shift (“his best speech yet”). But did the delegates?
• Andrea Jenkyns, the “passionate northerner” who beat Ed Balls in Morley and Outwood on 7 May, was rewarded by being allowed to introduce fellow northern MP (duh?), Tatton’s George Osborne on Monday. A former Lincolnshire councillor, Jenkyns’ career was almost derailed weeks after winning Boston NW in 2009. When it was discovered she was employed as a part-time county music teacher she had to resign from both jobs and fight her seat again. She beat the BNP (by 16 votes), but lost in 2013 (to Ukip).
• So keen are the Tories to burnish their credentials as the workers’ party that they welcomed Alexander Temerko, Ukrainian-born refugee from the Russian workers oligarchy, to their conference. The former Yukos energy executive turned British citizen and OGN energy executive is doing the conference rounds as a Tory donor and member of Dave’s leader’s group. It all goes down on his Kremlin file.
• Startled by a loud noise during his lunchtime chat with the Tory peer and pundit Danny Finkelstein, Jeremy Hunt quipped that it “might be Lynton Crosby” monitoring his on-message answers in his job as Tory campaign bully. If so, Crosby moved on too quickly. A few minutes later Hunt, whose wife is Chinese, innocently told Brits they must learn to work as hard as Americans or Asians. A winning slogan.
• Chanteuse Charlotte Church blames the Syrian refugee crisis on climate change. Not to be outdone, the sacked environment secretary Owen “No Wellies” Paterson blames it on faltering global free trade. “That is why we have had these appalling scenes in the Mediterranean where people are trying to get out of areas where they cannot generate wealth,” he told the Thatcher Foundation fringe. Nothing to do with bombs or beheadings then?
