Tory conference is, if nothing else, a spectacular lesson in branding. Echoing the party’s ruthlessly on-message Parliamentary tactics, designed to drive its slogans home in a media soundbite age, Manchester’s grand post-industrial edifices were festooned with a thousand deep blue banners.
“Security. Stability. Opportunity”, they sternly intoned, boiling the party’s intended offer down to its purest and most appealing form.
These three words, rendered in unfussy, solid capitals, with full stops to drive the point home, appeared to point to a Tory trinity: past, present and future – an ambition to assume narrative control, bringing with it a “one nation” party with the power to embody politics as a whole.
There was a sense that, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour threat had receded. This was a movement delighted at its apparent luck, content to turn to a thousand policy debates unmolested by the spectre of an electoral fight.
Gossip abounded about the hectoring shouts of protesters beyond the conference fortifications, but it was the sundry press and public affairs professionals thronging the fringes and hallways who appeared most ruffled from running the gauntlet: the true blue Tories among the crowd seemed unconcerned, or even energised.
As the party slid comfortably into the driving seat for five years in undisturbed power, the confidence radiated from every blue-draped pillar and every glowing screen.
Also seemingly radiating from every screen was a face whose ascendance has been intimately linked with its big ambitions for growth, both electoral and economic: Chancellor George Osborne, increasingly designated official unofficial leader-in-waiting by the eager commentariat.
Accelerating his campaign to create a “Northern Powerhouse”, with a clarion ambition to reclaim the region’s disaffected and previously Tory-phobic voters, the Chancellor delivered a powerful speech in which he presented himself as a man prepared to take a chance on his constituency and others like it.
Continuing his careful construction of a serious, hard-hatted persona rolling up his sleeves to take tough decisions on behalf of working people, he declared: “We are the builders!”
In the brave new world conjured forth in the Chancellor’s pitch to his party, the contrast couldn’t be starker: later on, outside, in the surprisingly balmy Manchester night, newly-elected Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, adopted hero of the anti-austerity protest movement, was addressing his flock.
Here was the destroyer of the beautiful Conservative future – a face from the past with a policy offering to match, outside the ring of security both real and imagined for this future-focused blue-bedraped nation.
DeHavilland has covered hundreds of fringe events and main speeches at the four main party conferences. Order a copy of their comprehensive conference briefing online here.