And so farewell, then, to a party conference season in which the Liberal Democrats in Blackpool were riven by rumours of a leadership challenge - even though nobody put their head above the parapet to challenge Charles Kennedy for the job.
At first, Labour in Brighton too was dominated by the brooding jealousy of Gordon Brown. Then the conference was scandalised by the treatment of Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who was thrown out and briefly detained under anti-terror laws for shouting "Nonsense!" during Jack Straw's speech on Iraq. Grovelling apologies followed.
Then in Blackpool the Tories' high risk strategy, of allowing their leadership contest to be played out in full view of the television cameras instead of in oak-panelled rooms in Westminster, has paid off by delivering their most exciting conference in years. "I'm going to let you into a secret. To be honest, I didn't know if this conference was going to work," confided Michael Howard. "And nor I suspect did you. But it has. We've had a truly remarkable week."
But don't believe it when the Tories say that they have rediscovered discipline and will no longer stoop to back-biting. This morning, a David Cameron supporter who will remain unnamed was to be heard assuring journalists that: "David Davis is Iain Duncan Smith with hair." Ouch!
When Michael Howard makes his final plea for discipline this morning, he need have no fear about the loyalty of one Tory member - the author, raconteur and former MP, Giles Brandreth.
Mr Brandreth claims that he is so loyal that he went grey under John Major and started balding under William Hague, and is prepared to be equally loyal to whoever is the new leader. "I will adopt a Scottish accent if need be. I will take up smoking if need be. I will have my nose broken in five places if need be. And I will buy a romper suit and move to Notting Hill if need be," he assured Mr Howard.
Mr Brandreth added that he came from an old Anglo-Welsh family, with Anglo-Welsh parents. "They burned down their own cottage."
The Tory hierarchy was furious this morning to discover that The Times had overheard David Cameron rehearsing in the conference hall, and was able to inform readers that his speech was not ad-libbed, as his activists claimed, but was carefully practised in advance.
Fears of a repeat caused the hall to be shut off to journalists tonight - accidentally blocking irate hacks from access to the lavatories as well as to their computers - as Michael Howard rehearsed his final speech as Tory leader, which will close conference tomorrow.
Desperate pleas eventually persuaded organisers to relent, and lead a small party of journalists on a tortuous route through a noisy champagne reception with jazz band, a luxury VIP suite, and around the back of the stage, in order to get them back to the media centre.
As well as nobbling a glass of bubbly on the way through the party, I was able to pick up a couple of things that Mr Howard was saying. So I can exclusively reveal that he is planning to appeal to the Tories to behave themselves.
"Let's show we can elect a new leader without bitterness or backbiting," he will say. "And then, let's unite behind that new leader, not just for one or two years but for a whole Parliament!"
High ambitions, indeed.
 Michael Howard is still the leader of the Conservative party, but with all eyes fastened on his potential successors it is easy to forget the fact. So invisible has Mr Howard been at this year's party conference that rumours are circulating that he has already gone home to his Kent constituency.
This unkind gossip is denied by Tory press officers; and confirmation that Mr Howard is indeed still in Blackpool was provided yesterday by a Daily Telegraph photographer, who snapped him dozing and checking his watch during a speech by shadow Chancellor George Osborne.
The war of the freebies between the Tory leadership rivals in Blackpool has hotted up again. Yesterday Ken Clarke's supporters were handing out free bottles of water with his slogan on the label: "It's time to WIN". Today David Cameron's supporters have copied the stunt, and boast as they hand it out that they have gone one better: "Because ours is sparkling."
Unfortunately the bottles explode when opened. Let's hope it's not an omen.
Visit the Pimp My Party website and try your hand at redesigning the Tories as if they were a clapped out old banger. Rishi Saha of Wave Network, which designed the game, says that since it was released a couple of days ago as a way of raising the party's profile among teenagers, thousands have logged on and pimped up the Torymobile with flames and fancy hub caps.
Players are also allowed to choose a new driver, with leadership contenders Ken Clarke, David Davis and David Cameron all on offer. Tragically, so far Derek from Big Brother has proved far more popular.
Continue reading "Pimp My Party" »
Someone has been having a laugh at the expense of the Tory leadership candidates, giving dodgily appropriate titles to the essays they have written for a new book on how to get the Conservatives back into power.
The title of Ken Clarke's offering, for example, is Time is Running Out. Mr Clarke is 65. The thoughts of Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is also a relic of the Thatcher years, have been labelled Back To The Future. David Davis's are headlined, even more outrageously, Power to the People - the slogan of Tooting's most committed Communist, Wolfie Smith, in the TV sitcom Citizen Smith. DD was, as everyone has been reminded many times at conference, brought up by a single mum on a council estate in Tooting. Only David Cameron's essay has got a sensible headline (Conservatism - Public Service) which may suggest the political leaning of the editor of the book, a slim volume called From The Ashes. Poor Dr Liam Fox hasn't got an essay at all.
Feverish excitement in Blackpool at the prospect of hearing speeches today by two of the main Tory leadership contenders, David Cameron and Ken Clarke, has driven unprecedented numbers of delegates out of their beds to attend conference on time.
The result - a half-mile queue to get into the Winter Gardens conference centre that stretches all the way round the building. The gossip in the queue is that both today's speakers have launched their own fan T-shirts, although their slogans - "Time to Win - Ken Clarke" and "I (heart) DC" respectively - are tamer than David Davis's saucy message across the busts of comely young groupies that "it's DD for me".
How times change. The last time Iain Duncan Smith addressed the Tory party conference in Blackpool he gave possibly the most excruciating political speech of modern times. Gesturing woodenly as he squinted at his autocue, unable to clear the frog from his throat, he blew the fuses on a hundred hearing aids as he ranted that "the quiet man was TURNING UP THE VOLUME".
Nonetheless he got 17 standing ovations. Three weeks later he was out on his ear.
Today, without the cares of leadership on his shoulders, he was a changed man. He spoke passionately and without notes on his favourite topic - social justice - and gave an acute analysis of what the Tories must do to win power again. He only got one standing ovation, but this time I think they actually meant it.
The kiss-me-quick atmosphere of Blackpool, where entire shops sell nothing but rock, bumper stickers and novelty mobile phone covers, appears to have got to the normally grim-faced David Davis. Today his campaign team for the Tory leadership are handing out skimpy DD FOR ME T-shirts, in the hopes of seeing them stretched across the chests of attractive conference delegates.
Last night DD could be seen working the room at the Agents' black tie dinner in the Imperial Hotel, occasionally glaring across at his indolent rival Ken Clarke as he moved among the tables. Afterwards, DD stayed up late pressing the flesh in the Imperial's famous No 10 bar, where the photos of every British Prime Minister are hung on the walls. It did not take a mind-reader to interpret the frequent glances he threw at them: clearly, he was thinking "that ought to be me".
If you're a Labour Party supporter (or even, dare I say it, if you're not) you can log on to the Labour Party website tonight and enjoy a live webchat with Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell. Delegates at the party conference got the chance earlier this week to ask the Prime Minister questions in a session chaired by the comic Eddie Izzard. Transcript here.
Day four of the Labour Party conference in Brighton and if anything the leafleteers are growing in numbers.
Every morning when they arrive at conference and queue up to pass through the rigid security checks, delegates have to run through a gauntlet of activists who each try to shove a leaflet into your hand publicising their latest campaign or fringe meeting.
"China is sinking. China is sinking," one woman told me as I passed down the line. "All of it?" I asked, sniffing a news story and grabbing a leaflet quickly. In fact, her little tract alleged that the Chinese Communist Party is using labour camp workers for goods shipped to the UK. Nothing about China sinking at all.
This morning I collected 18 leaflets on issues ranging from Palestinian solidarity, to children's rights, racism, disabled rights, abortion deadlines, council house privatsations etc. I had to stop because my hands were full, but could easily have picked up 10 more.
I have taken a ride on the future of transport - but Ken Livingstone prefers to walk.
The PR firm Weber Shandwick was in town today lobbying for an amendment to the Road Safety Bill to allow people to ride Segways, the much-hyped two-wheeled human transporter, on pavements and bridle paths.
At the moment, they're not exactly legal, but that didn't stop the PR people bringing a couple to Brighton and encouraging delegates at the Labour conference to have a go. They even managed to get one into the secure area of the conference. They're surprisingly easy to use, although mine was speed-limited to 5mph so I could not do too much damage.
But an attempt to persuade Mr Livingstone to try one out failed miserably. The London Mayor, now back in the Labour fold, pointed to his legs and said: "I prefer to use these."
Perhaps they should have asked David Miliband, the Local Government Minister who caused a stir last week when he admitted that the Government had made a "vaulting, 180-degree, full-on U-turn" on council tax reevaluation. U-turns are very simple on a Segway.
They weren't as funny as the Full Monty pensioners, but they were a lot louder.
At least 3,000 Brighton and Hove Albion fans marched to the Labour Party conference at the Brighton Centre tonight, forcing police to close the main coast road past the venue, as they demanded that John Prescott give the green light to a new stadium in the Sussex Downs.
The Championship team (which has been up and down like a yo-yo in recent season) is currently stuck in a dismal 7,000-seat stadium in Brighton but wants to build a 22,500-seat stadium at Falmer, to the east of the city. But Mr Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister, has referred the planning application to a long-running inquiry, despite widespread local support.
The crowd tonight was chanting "We want our stadium" and "Albion, Albion" and carrying banners reading "Every Great City Needs a Stadium" and "Two Jags, No Stadium". Their numbers appeared to take police by surprise, even though even more fans had been expected, and when they refused to move on, police were forced to draft in reinforcements and encourage them to do so... Chanting loudly, they soon moved on down the promenade and it looked like the protest would pass off peacefully.
Splits, plots, rival camps, backbiting, leadership speculation - Charles Kennedy joked today that these were what lay in store for the Tory conference in two weeks time. But if he was honest, the Liberal Democrat conference has also had its share.
The delegates thought so, too, judging by the nervous silence during this sally and the forced titters afterwards.
So is the party in trouble? Was Mr Kennedy really under threat? How serious is the split between the modernisers, who want to make the Lib Dems a party of government with realistic fiscal policies, and the majority of the members, who prefer to keep their ideals pure and remain loftily criticising from the sidelines?
All a storm in a teacup, says Chris Huhne, MP for Eastleigh. "After an election a party loosens its corsets. It has just had three years squeezing itself into a shape designed to be attractive to the voters." Naturally, people just wanted to sprawl about a bit and let themselves go, he explained. "But at the end, the leader must get things together and remind them that we have to keep things under control, and I think Charles did that excellently."
Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? The fact is, however, that Mr Kennedy's team has come away from conference with their proposals in tatters, and no new flagship policies to argue for in the House of Commons. Perhaps the Lib Dems had better get back into their corsets.
Continue reading "Loosening the corsets" »
A large majority of Lib Dems voted tonight to make it harder to challenge for the party leadership. Lord Kirkwood, the former chief whip who proposed the idea, kept a straight face as he insisted that the scheme was a mere tidying up exercise, entirely his own idea and had nothing whatsoever to do with current grumblings about Charles Kennedy's leadership or the ambitions of any other senior figures (see below). No-one appeared to believe him, but they voted for it all the same.
Feathers are flying at the Lib Dem conference about the persistent rumours that Simon Hughes, the party president, is still nurturing ambitions of replacing Charles Kennedy as leader.
Exasperated by the gossip, Mr Hughes insisted on BBC Radio 5 Live today that he has twice assured Mr Kennedy - once in 1999, after the leadership election, and once more recently - that he will not stand against him. On the second occasion, apparently, he was so annoyed to hear that a senior colleague had been accusing him of plotting that he marched into Mr Kennedy's office to put the record straight.
The only trouble is that Mr Kennedy doesn't remember the conversation. Or at least, he didn't remember it - now, says his senior media aide, as the row threatens to escalate, some recollection of the chat is drifting back to him. "Charles does now remember something about it," she has just told reporters.
That ought to be that. But it seems that Kennedy's friends in the party don't believe Mr Hughes. They have tabled a motion this afternoon making it harder to mount leadership challenges - a motion which for some reason has won the nickname of the Stop Simon amendment. Hmm.
Tim Hames threw down the gauntlet yesterday by recalling in his column how a Lib Dem delegate told last year's party conference: "As a white witch, I am very disturbed at some of the literature being distributed outside this hall".
Since then, the hunt has been on for the most eccentric statement by a delegate. My offering comes from a steward on the North East MEPs stall in the conference fayre.
"Mercury amalgam in fillings and the radiation from 3G phone masts are a conspiracy by the global elite to keep the working class suppressed so that they don't realise what is happening to them," she said. "It finally made sense when I realised that the reason my cat had spent five weeks behaving strangely was to warn me and my husband."
Please e-mail Times Online if you have come across any other words expressing the spirit of Liberal Democracy.
Grey-haired and sensible Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Vince Cable is not famous as a wit, but today he earned a big laugh at his party conference with a joke about - of all things - sound financial costing of election policies.
It seems that the late Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta once asked the young Cable, who was then working as his aide, how to counter an election slogan being used by the Kenyan opposition: "Free land, free food, free beer and free women".
In his halting Swahili, Cable came up with the retort: "Hapana Chakeula Baksheesh", which loosely translates as "There's no such thing as a free lunch".
All very sensible and Liberal Democrat. "Mr Kenyatta listened to my advice courteously," remembered Mr Cable, "but decided after all to fall back on the tried and tested method of cancelling the election and throwing the opposition in prison."
A set piece debate on the ownership of the Post Office will today provide fractious Lib Dems with another opportunity to bop their leader on the nose at their party conference.
Charles Kennedy and his team were defeated yesterday on European spending, as the party unfaithful voted for the right of unelected Brussels bureaucrats to spend as much as they wanted. Mr Kennedy also suffered the personal indignity of being accused by Nasser Butt, the unsuccessful candidate for Mole Valley, of being a liability on the doorstep.
Mr Kennedy bore it well and this morning found the appropriate putdown, telling BBC News that some sour grapes were only to be expected from a loser. The Post Office debate is important, however, and if his efforts to impose some financial reality and common sense on his party are defeated again he may not bounce back quite so readily.
Continue reading "Going postal" »
The LibDem delegates have just given their leadership its first bloody nose, voting down a motion that proposed capping the European Commission's mushrooming budget. This was one of the issues on which Charles Kennedy wanted to impose some policy discipline on members, moving them away from the bad old days of cloud cuckooland economics.
Greg Hurst, Times political correspondent who specialises in the internal workings of the LibDems, rates this as a "middling" defeat - not catastrophic, but certainly more than a scratch.
Straight after the vote, Vince Cable, the party's Treasury spokesman, and one of the main advocates of the motion, tried to be philosophical. ""There are a lot of our delegates here who feel very strongly that they don't like anything to be interpreted as giving succour to the Eurosceptic point of view," he said, trying to put a brave face on it. "Elected MPs feel that Eurosceptic arguments have to be met head on, but conference came out with a different view."
He stoutly maintained that the defeat was not symbolic of doubts over Charles Kennedy's leadership, or tomorrow's looming battle in a debate about privatising Royal Mail. "This is about Europe, it is not about post offices or the leadership," Mr Cable insisted.
The result, naturally, is that Sir Menzies Campbell is now stoutly delivering a speech in which he calls British troops "part of the problem" in Iraq and states: "We must begin to bring this occupation to an end", but nobody much is listening because they are too busy talking about the last vote.
 The highlights of today's conference are likely to include Menzies Campbell's speech at 12.25pm in which the deputy LibDem leader is expected to demand that British troops are pulled out of Iraq. This was one of the issues at the last general election with which the LibDems succeeded in impressing the voters.
After lunch, party president Simon Hughes will speak to the delegates. Mr Hughes has forged a strong public profile for himself, first as LibDem home affairs spokesman and later as candidate for Mayor of London. He is now seen as Charles Kennedy's main rival, although he does not muster strong support among the party's MPs. Maybe this is why an amendment has been tabled to the party's constitution by arch-loyalist Lord Kirkwood, raising the number of MPs who must support any leadership bid from 2 to 7. It has already been dubbed the Stop Simon amendment.
But the most interesting moment of the day is likely to come at 3.20pm, when Mr Kennedy holds a question and answer session. Today's Populus poll for The Times shows that a third of all voters and - startlingly - 35 per cent of Liberal Democrats think that Mr Kennedy should not stay on as leader, after the party failed to make the predicted large gains at the general election. Yesterday he sweated profusely at his (short) press briefing where he was questioned brutally about whether he would step down. Last night he left his own press reception early - a big change for a politician known as a party animal, and possibly a sign that he is feeling some pressure.
Most Lib Dems profess to hate Blackpool, with its gaudy, wasteful mile of lights and its gin palaces of conspicuous consumption. This party is so green-thinking that it set up an online lift-sharing scheme, to prevent its 4,000 odd delegates damaging the ozone layer still further by making solo car journeys from the party's strongholds in the south-west of England, 400 miles away.
The car-sharing scheme was designed to appeal to the stereotype of the bearded, sock-and-sandal wearing recycling fanatics who supposedly make up the party's rank and file, but not everyone in the hierarchy fits the image. At a reception last night I asked Chris Rennard, the chief executive, how well the lift-sharing scheme had worked.
"It's a jolly good idea, isn't it?" said Lord Rennard jovially. "But I don't know yet how well it went. I have to admit that I and my wife came up by Ryanair."
Continue reading "Going green" »
Bad news for Charles Kennedy as the Liberal Democrat party conference gets under way: a Times poll finds that the party would fare better without him. Greg Hurst reports on a rule change that would make it harder to change leader. Times Online's Jenny Booth will be giving us blow-by-blow from Blackpool.
Final results are coming in from Germany's parliamentary elections, where voters seem to have ticked the none of the above box. It's a bit of a blow for Tony Blair, who was hoping that Angela Merkel would become a useful ally in Europe. Anatole Kaletsky says whoever's in charge, Germany's a loser.
Freddie Flintoff has given an interview to Simon Barnes and says "We’ve beaten Australia. Now we’ve got to be like Australia.” But didn't Australia just lose the Ashes?
And James Bone reports from New York on the 12 people waiting to undergo the world's first face transplant. Whose face would you choose?
Welcome to Times Online's coverage of the party political conferences, starting this year in Blackpool where the Liberal Democrats are gathering for the first time since their disappointing election results.
Delegates rolled up yesterday to find blustery winds buffeting the illuminations strung along the seafront, but otherwise fine weather. This is so unusual for Blackpool in conference season that veteran delegates muttered that they did not recognise the place without its shroud of rain.
Thousands of chip shops were open for business and a thin screaming noise could be heard from the rollercoaster as carriagefuls of terrified pleasure-seekers whipped past. Rumour has it that a handful of Lib Dem MPs have a bet on that involves going on the Big One, but it is not clear whether this is the prize or, more likely, the forfeit.
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