The first party conference I ever attended was at Buxton in 1984. It was a quaint spa town with assembly rooms small enough to accommodate the SDP. A few hundred people at most. Decades later and we are stuck with the usual venues for conference that are big enough to accommodate the thousands who now attend. Lib Dem conferences in recent years have alternated between Bournemouth and Brighton. There are the occasional conferences in Liverpool and Manchester. As long as we are not n Blackpool, everyone is happy.
Well, not quite so happy for Conservative members. It looks as though their conference in Manchester was a ghost town. Hardly anyone was there. Mel Stride, the Tory shadow chancellor, gave his speech on uncosted spending commitments and unaffordable tax cuts to a hall where over three quarters of the seats were empty. Sky News reported that there were far fewer exhibitors and partitions had been erected to close off much of the empty space. It's a far cry from the 1980s when Thatcher pulled in the crowds and the Tories were guaranteed to have the biggest conference going. As we stared enviously from the SDP conference in the phone box in the corner of the Old Assembly Rooms in Buxton 41 years ago, did we ever think the Tories would have to downsize to the likes of Buxton? What a strange world we now inhabit.
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