The country is in crisis but the Tories are delighted – they know they have all the time in the world

To put it bluntly, with the polls puzzlingly stable, nothing really matters at the Conservative Party conference, writes Marie Le Conte

Boris Johnson is not as popular as he once was, but he is currently unassailable (AFP/Getty)

Writing a column on Westminster isn’t entirely unlike meeting a friend for a catch-up, in that you ideally need at least one thing to have gone wrong in the recent past to really make it worth it. No one wants to turn up in a bar and announce that absolutely nothing has happened to them since the last meeting, and I cannot exactly come in here and say that there is nothing for me to talk about.

Which is why I spent a large part of Sunday chatting to people at the Conservative Party conference and hoping that they would be unhappy about something. The country is not doing tremendously well after all, and I thought I could pick up various bits of grumbling from the bars of Manchester.

I will be honest with you: it did not go very well. Every Tory I spoke to was, at worst, a bit knackered from the trip up or hungover from the night before. There were some minor gripes but none of them feel worth repeating here. I spoke to another journalist who had similarly been trying to get MPs to be grumpy about tax rises – but failed.

It is Tory conference in 2021 and, in the words of The Good Place, Everything Is Fine. It isn’t quite that the atmosphere is flat here; people seem happy to see each other, often for the first time in nearly two years. It’s just that, to put it bluntly, nothing matters.

Externally, Labour conference came and went, and it did not make the Tories especially worried. Even if it had, it is unlikely that there will be an election anytime soon, so the party has all the time in the world; it can get worried later. As it happens, polls are remaining puzzlingly stable despite food and fuel shortages, so Everything Is Fine.

Internally, Boris Johnson is not as popular as he once was, but he is currently unassailable. Conservative MPs love winning and the prime minister made them win – as long as the party keeps doing well, there is no reason for the leader to be ousted. On top of that, the parliamentary party is now ludicrously large and quite full of wild cards, so it’s unlikely that any given faction or contender would want to try their luck. Bloody infighting will return one day but in the meantime, Everything Is… well, you get the gist.

That being said, everything isn’t just fine; everything is a little bit empty as well. Though the number of registrations for the conference was similar to the pre-pandemic years, most fringes, speeches and receptions are emptier than they would usually be. Maybe it is because a lot of people are only turning up for one or two days instead of the whole shebang; maybe it is because people know that, really, nothing matters, and so they may as well head off to lunch instead.

Of course there will be the occasional disagreement, or feisty debate; that is, after all, what politics is really about. Still, most of it will be done for the sake of it, and feel quite weightless as a result, like siblings bickering over dinner.

It feels odd because conference season has, for many years now, been a messy and dangerous affair. Parties were divided and leaders were not always secure in their spots; MPs resented each other and tensions were palpable in the rooms.

This year should have been out of the ordinary too, given that we are just about coming out of a global pandemic. Instead, we have been handed the platonic ideal of party conferences; the Labour Party argued with itself for three days then the Conservatives went off to have a jolly. Everything Is Fine.

There are, of course, a thousand and one ways in which this winter could prove to be a catastrophe both for the government and for the country at large – it just doesn’t feel like it up here. The comedown may well be painful but, clearly, it can wait.