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- [00:00]
A
Hello.
- [00:00]
B
Welcome to the Hot Seat. I'm here with Professor Tony Travers. We're here to talk about the recent conference season. Welcome, Tony. So is this the most important conference season we've seen in the last 25 years, or is the effect of it on the three main parties being overblown?
- [00:15]
A
I think, looking back on it, it has been an important conference season. It's very easy in advance of the party conferences for everybody to roll their eyes and say, oh, dear, we've got to go to the party conferences. They're all staged. It doesn't make any difference. But actually, if you now looking back at it after the major conferences are all over, though, I realize that there are still Plaid Cymru and SNP conferences to come. But if you look back on the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat conferences, you can see now that it did change the political weather, however slightly.
- [00:46]
B
Let's go through them, starting with the Lib Dems. What sort of conference did the Liberal Democrats have?
- [00:53]
A
I think Liberal Democrats were aiming very strongly, something their leadership was from the beginning of the process of differentiating themselves from the Conservatives. All the parties now know that they're running into a general election in 2015, and for the Lib Dems, who've been in coalition with this terrible impact on their support in the polls, they're now beginning to look to separate themselves out so that when the election comes, they can say, we did this, we did this, or we stopped the Conservatives doing that. So they'll be able to say that. That they have an identifiable separate position. And indeed, more than that, they've begun to flesh out for themselves a position of saying, well, we can control the Conservative Party, we can control the Labour Party. Therefore, talking themselves into a position where they can be in coalition with either of these major parties if they need to be.
- [01:45]
B
And moving on to the Labour conference, it's possibly the most headline grabbing of the three. Is that fair to say? So take us through the Labour conference and Ed Miliband's speech.
- [02:01]
A
I mean, it's worth remembering, Ed Miliband does make good speeches at party conferences, and so I think people were expecting a reasonably good speech. Unfortunately for him, on the run up to the conference, he was beginning to get a pretty bad press from all the commentators and even some people in his own party asking, what does he stand for? What does Labour really mean? Is it any different from earlier New Labour type policy? And what the party conference did, I think did two things. One is it reinforced the idea that Miliband can make a good speech and secondly, it set the weather, really, for the rest of the conference season, that is, for the Conservatives. And he did, I think, in his conference speech, set out a position, particularly with, you know, the announcement of things like a freeze on energy prices and the cut in the business rates for small businesses. He set out a position which was very much on slight, no, but not slightly to the left of where the Labour Party had been hitherto, even after New Labour, but beyond that, trying to position Labour as the party of the many against an imagined few, real or imagined few. And I think that worked. And so I think Miliband actually did have a good conference.
- [03:22]
B
And what about the Conservative conference, then?
- [03:26]
A
The Conservatives, I think, also had a reasonable conference. They didn't have, you know, lots of factionalism. Nigel Farage turned up on behalf of UKIP to try to stir things in Manchester, but actually, in the end, I think his presence, if anything, pushed the Conservatives closer together, made them more disciplined. I think all Tories know that Nigel Farage is, from their point of view, one of the most likely instruments to get Ed Miliband into Downing Street. So they're beginning to sense that David Cameron is a polished speaker. He made another good speech, as he often does at these. And remember, he's made several. You know, he's now been leader for a long time, but I think in his speech he referred back to the Labour conference a fair amount and was clearly. It was clear from his conference that he needed to. To make the point that his party was still the party of, you know, what it's been in government, or he'd like to be something different if the Conservatives were in power alone. But he wanted to portray Ed Miliband as a drift back to the 70s, the Labour Party of the 70s and all the difficulties that that brings with it. So I think Cameron had a perfectly respectable party conference, the Conservatives as a whole did. But if you stand back from the three major party conferences, I suspect most people would see Labour as having made the political weather rather more than the other two conferences. So in that sense, it wasn't bad for any of them this year.
- [04:53]
B
So now, moving on to the issues that have overshadowed the conference, we had Damien McBride's memoirs overshadowing the Labour conference to some extent. That was the intention of the publishers and the serializers. The Conservative conference, in a way, was overshadowed by two things the shutdown of the American government and the issues with Ralph Miliband and David. Sorry, Miliband and the Daily Mail. So how much of that has boosted Ed Miliband how much of that has diminished the impact of the Conservative conference and how much of this has humanised Ed Miliband in a way that he never really achieved before?
- [05:35]
A
Damian McBride's book about his time as the super spin doctor to Gordon Brown was clearly a nasty moment for the Labour Party. I'm not sure there were many things in the book that most people didn't know. Most of the general public kind of know politics is not really for faint hearts and the delicate. And, you know, that being the case, what was in the McBride book, I don't think it caused that much surprise, but it did distract attention from the Labour Party Conference. Notwithstanding that, I think the Ed Miliband speech in the end stood above it and sort of got over that problem. Moving forward to the Conservatives, they did indeed face, at the beginning of their conference, the shutdown of the American government. I mean, a massive event for the politically interested in Britain. Probably not so for most people, but the extraordinary outbreak of war between Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail over an article in the Daily Mail about Ed Miliband and David Miliband's father, Ralph Miliband, who of course was an academic at the lse, I think that did overshadow the Conservative Party Conference to some extent. And more than that, I think gave Ed Miliband an opportunity to look strong and to appear to be in a much more powerful position than he'd been seem to be hitherto. But in fairness to a number of Conservatives, they have come to his support, I mean, quite strongly recently. So what it also showed is that the political class, in a sense, took an opportunity perhaps to make a point about the press more generally. In addition to giving Ed Miliband this extraordinary moment to have his say about the Daily Mail and this particular article, which was published a week ago, is.
- [07:31]
B
There any chance of there being a legacy, a changed relationship between politics and the press?
- [07:39]
A
Well, I think the spat between the Daily Mail group and Ed Miliband will affect the discussion about the World Post Leveson and indeed about the regulation of the press in the longer term. There's no question that it will affect the mood music. Now, whether it would lead to any change, we'll never know whether the result will be different to what would otherwise have happened. But there's no question it's going to affect the debate from now on. Has already affected the debate.
- [08:10]
B
All right, I think that's enough. Thank you very much. Tony Trevors, you're off the hot seat.