Ben Lowry: The Tories seemed surprisingly upbeat in Birmingham, perhaps feeling freed from the burdens of office
This week I was at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham.
It was the first time I have been to the conference of a major political party after it lost power following a long period in government.
The International Convention Centre in the UK’s second biggest city was certainly less packed than it was in October 2022, when Tory delegates last gathered there (that was in the middle of Liz Truss’s disastrously short-lived two month premiership). But it was busy enough given the scale of the recent Tory defeat and considering how people gravitate to power, rather than to political parties that are about to spend at least five years in the wilderness.
Had I been Rishi Sunak I would have realised that the opinion polls were showing such a consistent lead that losing was a certainty and so I would have held the general election at the last possible moment – late January. That would have meant another seven months in which to embed policies that Labour would find hard to remove when it finally got to power.
But perhaps he just wanted to end the agony. And that might explain why the mood was fairly upbeat at conference – the party had nothing to lose.
NI was not much mentioned and no unionist parties were present. Here is Alex Burghart, the new NI Tory spokesman, talking to me about legacy, and here is a report on how only one of the four Conservative leadership candidates turned up to a Northern Ireland reception at the conference. Also, here is a report and video on how I tried to ask the would-be leaders why they did not show.
• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor