The party conference season is as much a fixture in the national autumn calendar as the new school term and Guy Fawkes night. It briefly takes the spotlight off Parliament and the TV studios and for a few heady days illuminates both top and bottom of the political parties that claim the right to govern us.
This year’s conferences will be of particular importance as they are the last before a General Election and there are no prizes for guessing what the big questions at each of these events will be.
At Brighton later this month, speculation about Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s leadership and possible successors will surely be at fever pitch.
In early October, the Conservatives will be under equally intense scrutiny of a different kind at Manchester, a venue surely chosen to suggest a renewed wish for national unity. But will David Cameron’s high-sheen, apparently progressive leadership be enough to throw off the taint of past Toryism?
First up, starting this weekend, is the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth. The LibDems have had a good few years. They have been proved right on most of the major issues of modern times, from Iraq to the credit crunch to identity cards.
In Treasury spokesman Vince Cable they possess one of the few genuine stars of modern politics, who with typical acuity published his own tightly-costed proposals for fiscal tightening this week in a Reform group pamphlet. Meanwhile, Labour and the Tories publicly slugged it out over how exactly to describe what they might or might not do at some point in the future.
So why, despite all their strengths and successes, do the Liberal Democrats still not seem like the natural party of government? As they prepare for Bournemouth, Clegg and co are surely grappling with the problem of why voters respect them but do not vote for them when it really counts? In most polls, they hover around the 18% mark, trailing behind a paralysed and unpopular government. They did poorly in the European elections and failed to pull off an important victory in the byelection of Norwich North, where their vote actually decreased. LibDem MPs were inevitably if unfairly tainted by the expenses scandal.
The party has two chief difficulties, both possibly insurmountable.
The first is almost a philosophical one; the lack of an animating Big Idea. For all the problems the two major parties have – and the growing overlap between the two –Labour remains the party of avowed egalitarianism and the Tories the proponents of successful free enterprise.
But how many voters see liberalism as a guiding principle? Most would be hard-pushed even to define it. More frustratingly, both major parties draw on just enough liberalism to sharpen or sweeten their own message. Classic laissez faire liberalism has plenty of Tory adherents. And as leading Labour figure Jon Cruddas argued in an important speech this summer, Labour’s ethical socialism, which might yet animate this once great party again after the next election, has always drawn on a rich seam of humanist liberal theory.
More worldly observers are arguing that the next election will be won by more prosaic means. So seasoned strategists will be scrutinising the economic woes, wishes and voting preferences of everyone from Worcester Woman to Lidl Loser to Apple Mac Achiever. In this way, according to one commentator, ‘the election will take place in 650 ways in 650 different seats’. But of course politics is not just about cobbling together category coalitions or pandering to economic self-interest.
However technologically sophisticated we become as a society, elections are fairly back-to-basics affairs; we pick up a stubby pencil and huddle within a wobbly wooden frame. At such moments, we are moved by larger themes and the words of talented leaders. Only when the two come together, as Margaret Thatcher proved in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997, are general elections convincingly won.
This is a second, if subsidiary problem, for the LibDems. They don’t, yet, have in Nick Clegg, a truly inspiring leader. And, as Gordon Brown has learned over the past two and a bit years, practice does not always make perfect in the alchemy of leadership.
Clegg is competent, earnest and apparently passionate about ideas in private. In public, he comes across as rather wooden and pleased with himself. This year’s conference will be his last chance to prove his leadership talent, and the last chance for his party to win for itself something more tangible than respect.
Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist. Visit her blog at www.melissabenn.com
