Why on earth would anyone go to a British party conference?

There are bow ties and waistcoats, blazers and cigars. The men have pink faces, smooth cheeks and the air of people who would get bread rolls thrown at them in an Evelyn Waugh adaptation. Almost everyone looks as though they were bullied at school, or at the very least should have been. Absolutely everyone seems drunk. It is evening at the Tory party conference.

Party conferences are an annual ritual of British politics. The shtick is simple. Each autumn London’s political class decamps, en masse and in turn, to regional cities like Birmingham, where they are joined by party members, as well as assorted lobbyists and journalists. Having found themselves somewhere so alarmingly provincial, they promptly hide from the locals behind high fences and police cordons; drink warm white wine; attend talks with titles like “Getting our railways back on track: Will public ownership deliver the change we need?”; and worry that other people are having more fun than they are. Which—given that they are in a seminar on rail ownership in Birmingham—is a reasonable concern.

Such behaviour is striking enough to have attracted anthropological attention. A French study from 2005 of British party conferences approached them with the curiosity of a Victorian naturalist and heavy use of words such as “liminal”. It found that British conferences are indeed unusual. They stand out for their size (the Tories’ was said to be the largest in Europe); their frequency (most countries don’t do this annually); and the attention paid to them by the media (which has admittedly dwindled; in the 1970s the BBC offered live TV coverage from 9.30am).

History helps explain them. The first party conference was held in 1867 by the Tories. The Second Reform Act was about to give the vote to 1m or so more people and Tory MPs felt it might be a good idea to meet some of them. Not, note, to listen to them. If other people despise Tory activists, that is nothing to how the Tory politicians have historically tended to feel about them. Arthur Balfour, who was prime minister in 1902-05, said he’d “rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference”. Tories only really had to listen to members after 1998, when they got the power to pick their leaders.

There are two ways to think about this exodus from Westminster, which pauses parliamentary business for three weeks. The first is that conference season is a sober meeting of political minds. Here, policy can be debated, leaders chosen and reputations made—or broken. Sir Tony Blair, a former Labour leader and prime minister, said that giving his conference speech filled him every year for 13 years with “agony, consternation [and] madness”.

Conference season is also a serious opportunity to raise large amounts of money through ticket sales and sponsorships. In 2023 the Tories raised almost £7m ($9.2m) from their various conferences (smaller bashes are held throughout the year). A business-day pass to the Tory event this year cost £3,500; to reserve an exhibition stand at the Labour shindig cost up to £15,000. Some stands are worthy; some are weird. Some are both. In Liverpool Labour delegates could visit one named “Crustacean Compassion” to hear about the welfare of decapods.

The second way to look at these events is more as political cosplay. Like a Star Trek convention for people who happen to like Conservatives rather than Captain Kirk, the get-together in Birmingham offers somewhere that Tory party members can go, wear blazers and say things like “Hear hear” without fear of mockery—a safe space for people who hate safe spaces.

It’s not just the Tories. Florence Faucher, the author of the 2005 study and a professor of political science at Sciences Po, was shocked to realise that you can tell which political conference is which simply “by their…ways of dressing”. Tory conference was, she says, the first time she had “seen so many pinstriped suits”. Labour offers bright young men in sharp blue suits who like to talk about house building.

Reform UK offers older men in straining jackets. There is a strong smell of aftershave and a faint whiff of menace. There is little political discussion but there is a disco: the men circle the dance floor awkwardly, like a wedding to which only the bad uncles have been invited. As for the Lib Dem conference, everyone is so elderly that it feels less like a conference than a care home with added lanyards. In its halls, people with raincoats and earnest expressions vote on things like “Motion F32”, calling for “an immediate bilateral ceasefire” in Gaza. Doubtless Gaza will be grateful.

What there is not much of, anywhere, is women. Tories are fond of putting the question “What is a woman?” to the candidates in their leadership race. Visit their conference and it starts to seem that this might be less a culture-wars question than one of pure curiosity: there are almost none to be seen there. This year’s Tory conference is “just men, men, men”, says Isabel Hardman, author of “Why We Get the Wrong Politicians”. She thinks this is due less to sexism than sensibility: women are “more economical” with their spare time and tend not to think that spending Sunday in an “airless hall in Birmingham” is a good use of it.

Those in the conference halls may be mildly preposterous. But they are also, in their way, laudable: democracies would work less well if there were not activists who were ready to leaflet, canvass and run raffles. They are also surprisingly powerful. Members of the Labour Party chose Sir Keir Starmer, now the prime minister, as their leader in 2020. In the past decade, two prime ministers were appointed not by the public but by the Tory faithful; in November they will elect the leader of the opposition. Britain’s annual party-conference season is idiosyncratic, odd and deserving of mockery. It also matters. ■

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