QUENTIN LETTS: After the bleak Jim Davidson years, Jeremy was a Grade A catch - and he didn't disappoint
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Shadow farming minister Victoria Atkins started hyperventilating and making noises like a piglet: Jeremy Clarkson was about to arrive.
‘It’s so amazing, it really is!’ she squealed. On lumbered Clarkson in, miraculously, a suit. Miss Atkins flung herself at him. For a moment I thought I was watching Aussie rules football.
This gathering of middle-management worriers finally had a star in its midst. In Iain Duncan Smith’s days as leader the Tories had to make do with Jim Davidson and Rick Wakeman for celebrities. Clarkson was a Grade A catch. Not that he was entirely on script. With the Birmingham Symphony Hall far from full, his first words were: ‘I see a lot of people have come dressed as seats.’
The organisers had kept his appearance a secret, presumably for surprise value. Or did they fear he might change his mind at the last minute?
Farmer and pub owner Clarkson took a while to warm up but eventually coughed up the goods, describing the hideous financial effects of Labour’s national insurance whack. He was thinking of opening a second pub but not in Britain. ‘Why would anyone set up a business right now in this country?’
There was a swipe at West Oxfordshire district council’s planning committee – such low IQs, he was surprised they could tie their shoelaces – and banter about that government minister who suggested that owning black labradors and drinking ale in a country pub was racist. Clarkson’s own dogs were fox-red labs and he drank lager, so ‘I’m living, breathing socialism’.
In Iain Duncan Smith’s days as leader the Tories had to make do with Jim Davidson and Rick Wakeman for celebrities. Clarkson was a Grade A catch
He made the activists laugh. More than that, he assured them they are not political lepers. He brought a chink of mainstream light to a conference that has been heroically dull.
With his anecdotes about Cotswold farm life, about a pond he had dug, and the grebes and newts that visited it, he raised the Tories’ snouts out of the policy documents and transported them to the world where otters swim and bees suck and the human spirit can fly if it is allowed enough freedom by damn politicians.
For years Tory conferences were gothic blood-curdlers riddled by plotting and incident. Not this one. My, what prosaic solemnity reigns. In the fringe meetings and stage events you are hit by earnest (depressing) presentations from pollsters and think-tank droners with their endless analysis of data. The language is technocratic, about ‘holistic approaches’, ‘key drivers’, ‘risk premiums’ and ‘next generation solutions’. It’s almost Blairite, yet Right-wing. Where the Reform conference was all pizzazz and no policy, here it is the opposite.
A business panel made sensible but fantastically boring points about over-regulation and over-taxation. The one moment of surreal interest came when an entrepreneur with a facelift claimed that visiting her local Waitrose was like going to ‘the Wild West’. There’s been a shootout in the homebaking aisle again, sheriff.
Andrew Griffith, the new Shadow Chancellor, gave an admirably low-tax speech. His delivery was a little peculiar, mind you. He kept trying to tickle applause from the audience by doing tickle gestures with his fingertips.
Mr Griffith is a Thatcherite City geezer with a high voice and trendy spectacles that create a horizontal bar on his hairless head. At first glance he is Gregg Wallace without the dimples (or, thank goodness, the complications).
He went quite a long way in criticising recent Tory governments. ‘For too long we failed to make our case’ and ‘we were divided and lost touch with our principles’.
He obviously knows how to read a balance sheet. This was never evident with Rachel Reeves and may not apply to John Healey. But his public-speaking style needs more bottom. A lectern would have helped.
This feels like a party still very much up in democracy’s dry dock. Although the policies are sensible and the intentions seem honourable, the throb of power is absent and attendance is slight.
Mrs Badenoch is the great hope but even the most acrobatic water-skier cannot pull the speedboat.
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