Oh lordy, the party political conference is a 'hoot and nanny'

I love when TV interviews people who go to party political conferences. These people fall into three basic categories:

a. Someone who has been elected to something in their party
b. Someone who wants to be elected to something in their party
c. Someone who is out on institutional day-release to attend the conference

1. The Conservative supporter is inevitably a Jacob Rees Mogg clone, in a four, or even five-piece suit, sounding either like Jacob or otherwise sounding like a Gloucestershire country bumpkin who inevitably needs plugging into a slow-speed charger following the interview.

2. The Labour supporter, usually looking like Dave Spart from Private Eye, has great difficulty in pronouncing basic English words. They use “basically” and “essentially” before each sentence, include a “literally” in the middle, and will happily declare Barbara Castle from the Harold Wilson years as the finest Transport Minister who ever was. This, despite the fact that while she was in real life quite an effective politician, as Transport Minister, not only could she not drive, but was the one who introduced that awfully antisocial and rather middle-class device to suppress the civil liberties of the drinking classes, namely, the breathalyser.

3. The Liberal Democrat will look like 'I don't know what' from 'I don't know where' (possibly from an original episode of "Star Trek"), but will know how to operate one of Sir Ed Davey’s wonderful stand in/sit on/wind up props that denounces whoever happens to be in power at that particular time. They will still be elated at having won a by-election the previous decade in a town that people in London had never heard of - because they are from London - and that people in the provinces never heard of because, well, they are clueless when it comes to basic geography, thinking, as they do when on TV quiz shows, that Paris is a country in France and that American Wrestling is real.

4. The Green supporter will look like Swampy who has just come down from a tree. They will have either extremely unsuitably-coloured hair for their age, or it will simply be the case that they just haven’t washed it for years. They will have a large, cheap, nasty curtain ring through the septum of their nose in solidarity with their fellow bovine intellectuals on the farm who must have one so as to be safely led to market. They don’t realise that the irony of Dale Vince’s surname, if pronounced Vonce, as it quite often is, is the Yiddish word for “bedbug”. They will inevitably be photographed with their sole MP, Caroline Lucas, under a poster advertising the TV quiz show “Pointless” and wearing a t-shit featuring a picture of Sir (sic) Natalie Bennett sitting by a freshly dug meadow with the caption “Plant your own Dope”.

The Conservatives will knock Labour, while Labour will knock the Conservatives. The LibDems will knock on the door of the conference centre because they haven’t quite grasped the concept of door handles. The Greens will knock on wood, as they are very environmentally friendly, and besides, older members of the Greens will remember sitting in front of the telly drooling over Amii Stewart singing it on Top of the Pops in the late 70’s.

The main reasons people go to these conferences are either to be noticed so that they can be elected to a position or to go to grandstand to others what they've actually done since they were elected to a position the previous year. “Oh yes” says Tarquin, the Conservative councillor for Penistone, “I campaigned religiously – not on a Sunday you will understand - to obtain funding for the local drop-in centre for disabled, non-gender-specific, single, gay fathers, and you have noooooo idea how many snot-infested babies I had to kiss and just pretend they would make wonderful future models or HR Directors”.

Some attend because they're sad individuals and have nowhere else to go to show off their new Aldi “Bag for Life”.

I'm just waiting for a Joe Soap attending the Labour Party conference being interviewed to turn around and say “Oh look, f’rinstance, like, basically, England only ever win the World Cup under like, virtually, only a Labour Government, and it’s that John Major bloke wot privatised the trains like innit”.

Yes, but, er, Baron Beeching, under a 1960’s Labour government, closed more than half of the UK's railway stations and a third of its railway lines. Er, and the Money Pit, er, sorry, I mean, HS2, was first investigated by the Labour government under Gordon Browne in January 2009. Oh, and Gordon also presided over the destructive financial crisis of 2008 which the country is still reeling from today.

Or perhaps Tarquin will claim during his interview that “Labour are just rabble-rousers lead by a bearded Trotsky loon”. Er, no, Tarquin. The bearded Trotsky loon had been rightly binned. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Labour Party is now lead by, not only a Sir, but a real KC who was Director of Public Prosecutions. Not someone who was Editor of the Spectator, dresses like he’s just got out of bed (whose bed, we cannot ascertain precisely at this moment) and has bestowed honours from the King on everyone in Downing Street except the cat. 

But he did “get Brexit done”. And now we the public have also got done as a result. Although on this occasion, Brexit was the fault of the clueless coffin-dodging voters who will never have the opportunity of suffering the full consequences, which at least proves democracy in the UK still works..

Yes, the interviewees all use daft adjectives to describe the opposition parties that are always in relation to how ridiculous they, the interviewees look. If only they knew how ridiculous they appear when they start talking with their stupid adjectives while at the same time mispronouncing basic English words and looking like 45-year-old teenagers.

Yes, party political conference attendees all, to quote boardroom bullshit, “seem to be on the same page”.

Sadly, that same page is in the fifth volume of a trilogy. Or in Viz.