“We are checking the pulse, and I think we are still alive” quipped one former Government Minister on the eve of conference to a member of the FGS Global team, summarising the mood as MPs travelled to Manchester.
It is fair to say that the Conservative Party headed into its Party Conference with confidence at near rock bottom. With their biggest loss ever at the last election, division and despair now seeping through the Party, and Reform UK hunting like hyenas around wounded prey, it is difficult to see when the turning point will be for the Conservatives, if it arrives at all.
While Conservative Party HQ published some significant and headline-grabbing policy in the lead up to conference, from scrapping Stamp Duty, repealing the Employment Rights Bill, deporting 150,000 migrants a year and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), MPs in reality feel like they are sleepwalking, going through the motions, with the sense that no matter what policy is announced, the damage of the previous election and successive internal issues is too deep to recover.
Badenoch’s answer was a tighter fiscal frame and a bolder retail offer: a new “golden rule” to split savings between deficit reduction and tax cuts, and the surprise promise to abolish Stamp Duty altogether, big politics designed to jolt a flat conference back to life. It certainly worked in the conference hall, but in reality, little is likely to cut through with a disinterested electorate.
Nearly every day, other news stories pushed the Conservative announcements down the news agenda and off the front pages. The struggle of the Party for relevance was perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that even the usual protesters – a staple outside any major political event – failed to turn up in Manchester, prioritising Reform UK (and Labour) instead.