On paper, the traditional role of the journalist at a British party conference boils down to some simple questions: what was the mood of the assembled activists? Did the leader give a good speech? In practice, the changing nature of conferences and the media makes this superficially simple task more complicated than it may initially appear.
Any journalist covering the leader’s speech, for instance, will have watched it in full. But it will reach the vast majority of its intended audience in fragmentary form, through clips – and speeches are increasingly written with that reality in mind. The conference hall is not really the audience, or the full speech really the product. This adds a layer of complexity to the reviewer’s task.
Likewise, it is less meaningful than once it was to talk about the mood of the conference. Thirty years ago, when our political parties were much more robust social institutions than they are today, millions of Britons were party members through thick and thin, and thousands attended annual conference whether they liked the leadership or not.
It was this democratic culture that gave us the spectacular showdowns at Labour conferences in the 1980s, or Tory activists cheering Norman Tebbit’s excoriation of the European Union in the 1990s. But it is unthinkable now: most people disaffected with a party – especially the Conservatives – are simply not members of it; they certainly don’t take time off work and spend several hundred pounds to attend conference.
Even with that caveat, however, there is no doubt that the mood inside the Conservative party is considerably improved on last year’s. Manchester proved that Kemi Badenoch can make good use of a spotlight, even in otherwise extremely challenging conditions, and her position has improved markedly since then. Her personal ratings are up, her party’s polling has recovered (a little), her only real rival for the leadership has defected to Reform UK, and Reform has its own problems.
The policy side of things is helping, too. I was very critical of Badenoch’s decision to go as slowly as she did on policy, and do think that first year of near-radio silence did the Tories serious damage. But the eventual policy announcements have, so far, been generally well-considered; if they still tend to err too much on the side of caution, it is at least better than the alternative, the wild promises of an opposition which has abandoned all hope of office.
Birmingham has also confirmed that the Conservatives have recognised the need for a strategic pivot. Badenoch has come under fire from some quarters for returning to the party’s “comfort zone” on tax cuts and deregulation, rather than trying to reassemble Boris Johnson’s 2019 coalition and go blow-for-blow with Reform.
But that analysis fundamentally misunderstands the current state of play. As much as the gladiatorial spectacle of the “fight on the right” appeals to journalists, so long as the Tories and Reform are polling where they are, they are not really each other’s primary opponent. Reform’s immediate front lies through Labour; of the 98 seats where it placed second in 2024, 89 are held by a Labour MP.
The Conservatives’ front, in contrast, is much more southern, affluent and Liberal Democrat-facing. Many commentators, both inside the party and out, too quickly assume this means “liberal”, because they assume such voters should be Tory by default. This ignores the fact that, by 2024, the Conservatives did not actually have an attractive economic pitch to those voters. Badenoch’s bet is that a substantial number of these voters – both those who defected to the Lib Dems and a large share who party strategists identify as simply having stopped voting – can be wooed back with a strong economic offer on things such as childcare and inheritance tax.
It remains to be seen whether she gets the polling bounce that is the traditional marker of a successful party conference. But based on what I saw over the past few days, I would say this was broadly a positive event for the Tories.
I worry, however, that the party itself is over-reading it. Yes, its situation has improved – but that is clearing the extremely low bar set by two sets of catastrophic local elections in 2025 and 2026. Yes, Badenoch’s personal ratings have improved – but she remains in truth the second least unpopular leader, rather than a particularly popular one.
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Tory loyalists can be perhaps forgiven, meanwhile, for playing up the “Kemi bounce”, which has lifted their party from about 17.5% to about 20% in the current polling average, while ignoring the “Kemi slump” that preceded it (she took the leadership when the party was at 26% on that same average). But you would not guess, reading the room in Birmingham, that the Conservatives are still several points shy of their disastrous vote share at the 2024 election.
Yet perhaps this is again a problem of the chimerical nature of conference. The party strategists I spoke to seemed quite realistic about their task at the next election: avoid extinction and remain the largest rightwing party. But the party leadership could hardly make that their top line: it would simply demotivate their remaining troops and be severely punished by the press.
It is therefore their difficult task to consistently strike an optimistic note without entirely falling for it themselves – and ours to try to work out if, or when, they have.
